A cultural discovery app connecting young Australian travellers with authentic, locally-hosted experiences across Asia — like having a friend in every city.
Young Australians are one of the fastest-growing traveller demographics in Asia — but most end up in the same tourist traps, disconnected from the communities they're visiting. Not because they don't want authentic experiences, but because no platform exists to connect them with the people who can actually provide them.
Roamy is a marketplace where local hosts offer personal, guided experiences — from a tea ceremony in Kyoto to a street food tour in Bangkok. Think Airbnb Experiences, but designed around the actual human on the other side rather than reviews and throughput.
Our team came to this problem personally — we share backgrounds across Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, and all of us had felt the friction of navigating unfamiliar cultures. Secondary research confirmed what we already knew: the problem isn't lack of interest, it's that there's no trusted way to connect travellers with the right local people.
"Young travellers in the Asia-Pacific increasingly prefer under-the-radar destinations and culturally rich itineraries — valuing genuine local connection over curated tourist experiences."
We ran surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand how young Australians actually engage with international travel. From this, we built three distinct personas representing different relationships with cultural exploration — from the frequent traveller who craves depth, to the social-media-led tourist who doesn't know where to start.
A key theme across every interview: people engaged more when they knew who they were meeting. Even just a name and a reason someone hosted changed how participants talked about the hypothetical experience. That became one of our core design principles — surface the person before the product.
We mapped a detailed journey for one of our key personas — someone who only picks up travel ideas from social media, never from dedicated apps. The gap kept appearing in the same place: the moment of curiosity is there, but there's nowhere real to take it. They want to go deeper; there's just no clear door.
Roamy is a marketplace for locally-hosted cultural experiences. Travellers browse, book, and attend experiences run by verified local hosts — from tier-one (a 1-hour coffee tasting) to tier-three (a full-day fishing trip with a family). Each experience is built around cultural depth and personal connection, not tourist throughput.
Explore
Personalised discovery of locally-hosted experiences, organised by type, tier, and cultural focus area — not by popularity score.
Roamy Local Badge
Verified host profiles with trust badges build confidence for first-time users. Safety and authenticity, baked in structurally.
QR Ticket
Secure digital QR tickets for each booking ensure easy check-in and verified host identity — one less thing to worry about abroad.
Achievements & Network
Collect badges, compare with friends, and build a travel network of fellow Roamers — turning solo exploration into community.
Roamy's visual identity was designed to feel youthful, inclusive, and optimistic. Sky blue and royal purple anchor the brand — bright enough to feel energetic, distinct enough to stand out from generic travel apps. Forest green signals trust and growth, while the neutral greys keep the UI calm and legible.
We validated the core concept using a pantomime scenario — participants engaged in a simulated cultural exchange experience set in Thailand or Japan, before any high-fidelity prototype existed. This gave us signal on willingness to pay and emotional response to the concept itself, not just the interface.
Pantomime Scenario (Concept Validation)
Participants simulated a cultural exchange in a café setting. Pre/post Likert surveys measured cultural confidence, emotional connection, and intent to use. We needed proof the concept would resonate before building.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Tested core booking flow and information architecture. Key finding: users needed clearer explanation of what the "Verified Local Badge" actually guaranteed — trust signals weren't self-explanatory.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Refined communication features between travellers and hosts. Improved trust signal hierarchy, booking confirmation flow, and the host profile layout. Severity of identified issues dropped from Major to Minor across all categories.
After the pantomime scenario, participants completed pre/post surveys measuring cultural understanding, language confidence, and intent. The results were stronger than we expected:
I've been to Japan twice but never felt like I actually connected with anyone local. This is exactly what I wish existed.
— Participant, post-pantomime scenario
The biggest thing this project taught me: you can't add trust as a feature at the end. If the platform doesn't structurally make locals trustworthy and travellers feel safe, no amount of nice UI fixes that. It had to be designed in — through verified host badges, reviewed profiles, QR tickets that confirm identity on arrival. The decisions that felt like boring implementation details turned out to be the most important design decisions we made.
Our team had four different cultural backgrounds between us — Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indonesian. I assumed that would make it easier to agree on what "authentic experience" meant. It made it harder, in a good way. Every time we thought we'd landed on something, someone would push back from a completely different angle. The design ended up being more honest because of it.
The pantomime scenario was the best research call we made. Testing whether the concept resonates before you've built a single screen feels backwards — until you get the results. Getting emotional signal before interface feedback is a different kind of data, and I'll use that method again.
Out of every project in our cohort, Roamy was selected to be showcased at the University of Sydney graduation show — an evening where members of the public, industry guests, and academics came to see the year's best student work. Seeing strangers engage with something we'd built from a whiteboard sketch was genuinely surreal. The project was also included in the USYD yearly design catalogue, and our team finished with a High Distinction.