Buckle up: Texas Highways Magazine partners with UT students to develop interactive travel game
Are you ready for a Texas-sized adventure?
We are!
We’re Melanie Leon-Tejada, Hope Gullat, Dina Barrish, and Aislyn Gaddis — journalism majors at The University of Texas at Austin. As Texas Highways Magazine gears up for its 50th anniversary of publication, we’re partnering with Digital Strategies Manager Tyson Bird to provide individualized travel suggestions for readers and improve audience engagement. Our big question is How might we help connect Texas Highways readers with road trips and destinations that uniquely interest them?
The task at hand is to create an interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” game or quiz on texashighways.com, designed to help users pinpoint their travel preferences—be it budget, region, or interests. Through linking existing Texas Highways articles in the game, we’re also aiming to provide easier user access to the magazine’s bank of evergreen content. Success of this project will be measured through various metrics, including total users, time spent on the page, pageviews, game completions, ad impressions, and newsletter signups.
First, we’re building a list of stakeholders – ranging anywhere from travel bloggers, to parents with young kids, to college students, to camper influencers — to assist us as we ideate and test the product. We’re designing a survey to distribute to these stakeholders, with multiple choice questions such as “What aspect of trip planning is the most difficult for you?” and “In which season do you travel the most?” Once we gather this user data, we can help Tyson and his team write the interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” game and develop the algorithm to match readers with destinations.
During the marketing phase, we will create a “day of launch” plan for how this project fits into the Texas Highways ecosystem and produce an ongoing social media campaign to promote the game. Our ultimate impact will include contributions to pre and post-development.
We can't wait to start this journey with Texas Highways and help readers explore new Texas terrain!
We created a moodboard as a sample of the color scheme and design we might implement.