Rio For Partiers (www.rioforpartiers.com) is my travel guide to Rio, made from love for Rio and the use of design-thinking. It was developed with a team of interns over a record 5 month (most travel guides need 14 months from conception to print). It won 3 international awards, all claiming it was the best travel guide and publication for that year. It then helped evolve my one-book publishing company into a travel marketing firm.

So how did it come about?

Back in 2002, I saw an opportunity to create a new Rio de Janeiro print travel guide: offer a book that was up-to-date (most were updated every three years, terrible for nightlife and restaurant listings).

I had already been getting my toes wet in "travel information" as I had been hosting European and American buddies in my apartment whenever they came down to visit me, so there were lots of questions that were common, and explanations that were needed for weird or awkward situations. But all these haphazard bits of local knowledge weren't enough to help design and write a book.

Travel guide as tool

Our first approach was to redefine the product. We discussed with tourists about our past experiences with guide books. We decided to treat a travel guide as a tool and not just a compendium of recommendations on Rio. Why a tool? Well, if you are on the street, and you want to quickly figure out where to go next, you shouldn't need to leaf through EVERY page to find that one place you liked... you should be able to jump to the right chapter and then leaf a few pages.

The other reason to treat it as a tool and not a book is that very few people read travel guides from cover to cover; they tend to just jump in, looking at the pretty pictures, maps, and illustrations before reading the paragraphs. So each page spread needed to be visually unique, with a different layout and content style.

Sequence of chapters

We questioned the Lonely Planet chapter sequence (intro, Brazilian culture, history of Rio, sightseeing tours, cultural tours)... Do people want to read a travel guide? For some strange reason, valuable content should appear first. To decide a more natural order, we took cards with the words DAY ACTIVITIES, NIGHTLIFE, STREET FOOD, RESTAURANTS, LODGING, ARRIVING, BEFORE YOU LEAVE, AND NEARBY DESTINATIONS.

We carried out a simple user preference experiment: I spread them on a table at an Ipanema hostel and asked the guests to place those cards in order of importance, the most important at the beginning. After 30 guests chose their order of preference for the chapters, we decided on (OVERVIEW OF RIO, WHAT TO BRING, LODGING, DAY ACTIVITIES, NIGHTLIFE, FOOD AND RESTAURANTS, NEARBY DESTINATIONS, SHOPPING GUIDE).

Other insights we discovered from tourist interviews and front desk attendance exercises:

• We observed tourist leaving the hostel and noticed they walk all day with a guide, the size of the printed book should not be bigger than a jacket or cargo pants side pocket.

• When contacting a tour operator or tourist attraction, apart from phone numbers and emails, we noticed that travelers feels more apt to reach out if they have the first name of the contact too, so whenever we could, we would add a name to the company's contact info.

• Fashion was also a concern expressed from interview with backpackers, as no other guide covered what one should wear to the beach, at night, or to a restaurant ("Can I wear my Havaiana flip flops, as it is common in Ibiza?"). So we added a chapter on this, near the beginning of the book.

• We listened to guests ask questions to their hostel reception desk and realized we needed to defined an "approachability" rating to each nightlife location to explain how like a tourist is to make Brazilian friends. Basically, if people are standing, such as at outdoor events, pubs, and clubs, your chances of meeting others are higher than if everyone is seated, such as at a restaurant or wine bar.

• Most tourists were very curious about supermarket foods, so we picked out the more popular and unique food types and made a chapter on them, next to the street food.

The application of user-centered design (now-a-days called design thinking) was crucial to creating a new type of travel guide that has since influenced the design of my competitors (I see them using my innovations in their guides all the time, and love it.)