UX Case Study
Time Travel Tourism
Project Overview
Virgin Mobile has cracked the code on safe time travel for the masses. The company is building a brand and setting up a responsive eCommerce website to promote travel packages to their 289 worldwide destinations existing throughout human history. it has decided to call it’s new time travel endeavor Zeit.
Time Frame
80 – 100 hrs over 3 months
Define
Problem
Introducing a completely new concept and product to the consumer, time travel tourism.
Hypothesis
Zeit needs to guide potential time travelers through comparison shopping and get them to book their trip. It should be feasible to create a time travel tourism site using current online travel booking sites to understand user expectations. Using familiar design patterns and flows the introduction of a wholly new product should be less foreign. It should be like planning any other trip they have completed prior.
Research
Research Questions
Time travel is a new field of tourism; how will ticketing, marketing, comparison shopping, branding, and product education work? The ecommerce site should not only inform about a time travel package but make shoppers excited about booking a trip?
The research will look into what current needs and expectations are for booking online and address how time travel might change them.
The research will also help see if there is any overlap in the needs of users, technological, and main stakeholders.
Research Methods and Persona
Time travel tourism is not currently available, so current travel trends and online booking site design patterns became the main focus of secondary research.
The primary research, 1:1 interviews, focused on finding out current user expectations, motivations, goals, and frustrations planning travel and using online sites to help them book a trip.
Comparative Analysis
Comparative analysis allows for direct and indirect comparison of existing online travel booking sites – this was useful since currently there are no direct competitors for time travel booking sites. The online booking sites chosen for the comparative analysis were a mix of curated travel experiences and aggregated/filterable travel sites; they were analyzed for ease of use, user flows, features, and mood/branding.
The shared positive attributes to keep in mind:
- Simple, clean landing page layouts with clear call-to-actions
- Users can get back to a search or page with a shortcut or breadcrumbs
- Support for planning travel or answering questions was easy to find
- Translations provided in multiple languages and queued up quickly
- For Branding: often blue and white used as a background colors; pops of bright orange/pink used to call attention to primary actions buttons and links
1:1 Initial Interviews
1:1 user interviews allowed for a more relaxed discussion about participant’s experiences with travel and online travel booking sites. Overall, participants were looking for the most bang for their buck and were willing to wait or go through extra hoops to get better deals. If a better deal was not available or tickets or hotels were too spendy, then they would often just forgo travel.
Participants stated that they were more likely to abandon searches or put travel on hold because of cost, hidden fees popping at the end of check out, or the site being too difficult to navigate.
Lastly, most participants did not do their travel planning in one sitting. This means that they frequently could not navigate back to the exact flight or deal that they had found in their earlier search. Almost every single participant found this to be a point of frustration.
“There is a sea of info… you have to get on your freaking waders… overwhelmed into the booking process.
There are so many things you can do wrong, and you can miss out on discounts. You can’t count on consistency or opaque pricing from booking sites.”
– Participant 1
Initial Interview
Defined Persona
The overlapping interviewee qualities and shared processes from the initial research created the persona, Melody Pond, archetype “Wheeler and Dealer”.
Design Moving Forward
Moving forward, the project will focus on the following to make sure that the end product is staying true to the needs of the user.
- Visibility of System Status – Smooth navigation and clean layout
- Recognition Not Recall – Simple, accessible features and layout throughout site
- User Control & Freedom – Transparency cost, customization of cost, comparison, deals
- Flexibility & Efficiency of Use – Saving input and search results to come back later to book trip
Ideate
The ideation process focused on how the site would be organized, plus its look and feel. The primary and secondary resources helped format a persona which defined the function and flow of the site.
Feature Roadmap & Goals
I got to work on my minimal viable product’s feature roadmap for the site after defining potential overlap between the user, business, and technical goals.
Card Sorting & Quick Survey
The goal was to observe and review how potential users of the time travel booking website would categorize the varying times, places, or events. The card sorting results depended on each participant’s personal interpretation and definition of the piece of history they were being asked about; meaning that the facts of history were subjective instead of objective. Luckily there was enough cross-over categorizing from the closed and open card sorts to make up four main categories: Time Period, Destination, Event, and Person / Group.
All participants completed a quick survey about time travel before they went through the card sort. The survey revealed that both men and women needed reassurance that the process for time travel was safe. The survey also highlighted the concern and reservations that women had about time travel due to the historic treatment of women.
Sitemap
The sitemap took a couple of iterations to make sure it was easy to read and followed the basic feature roadmap and card sorting categories for time travel.
User & Task Flows
The main persona built out for this site is adventurous, ready for deals, and loves travel. The user flow options and actions for an enthusiastic traveler, like Melody, were considered when building out the user flow for viewing, selecting, and purchasing an online trip.
The task flow shows how she would move through the site to seek out a specific time/place and then purchase her curated trip.
The user flow shows how a referring site might bring Melody, the potential time traveler, into the site to see what kind of trips were available and pay for their trip. It also accounted for users needing more ability to save and come back to the site to complete booking their trip.
Task Flow: Shows how user would move through the site to seek out a specific time/place and then save the trip.
User Flow: User referred to Zeit, user looks over different kind of trips available and pay for their trip.
Branding
Creating a cohesive brand for Zeit was an important part of the requirements for this project. The branding for Zeit needed to be professional to reinforce visually how well organized and safe the company has made time travel. The hope was to blend the poppy, professionalism of Pan Am and the mind binding work of Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder.
Mood / Branding Keywords: Professional; Futuristic; Adventurous; Well-ordered; Jamais Vu
Wireframes and High Fidelity Mockups
After getting all of the basic pages laid out- I went to work doing preliminary sketches for the landing page’s filtering and call to actions. I purposefully chose a mobile layout due to interview feedback about users choosing to shop or look around for possible flights and hotels on a whim or when they were comfortable with whatever device was on hand.
Wireframes were based on the key pages that would be important to the user flow of searching for different times and locations around the globe to book a curated time travel trip. These morphed over time due to preliminary feedback from peers and users.
After the main screens were plotted out into wireframes, the main modules, components, and pages were updated to reflect the styling curated earlier in the design process.
Test & Iterate
Info gathered would be critical to checking out site interactions and user flows.
UX Testing
Participants were asked to complete tasks remotely while having their responses and screens recorded. The hope was to determine which parts of the site worked well and which parts needed further iteration.
Test Goals
- Ease-of-use during overall booking of specific trip or product
- Check user’s ability to estimate cost of trip
- View info about trip using page features
- Measure how well the trip is shareable on the site
- Check out/process flow – checking to see if user flow make sense
Participants
- Age range 27 to 69
- Participants: 4-6
- Psychographics (age/income): Varying
- Preferred qualities: avid users of online booking travel sites to varying exposure to online booking.
Tasks
Setup: You are really interested in what new places are available for time travel on the site.
- Can you find where to view new travel experiences on the site?
Find Specific New Destination Travel Page- Destination China (Goal 1) - On this individual trip page, where can you go to find…?
Find Specific Info on a Page (Goal 3) - Is there a way to figure out the cost of your trip if…?
Calculate Cost of Trip (Goal 2) - Can you show me the next steps to purchase your trip?
Use Checkout Process for Trip (Goal 4) - Since you’re all finished checking out email your friend their receipt.
Sharing Trip Info with Others (Goal 5)
Task Completion
Takeaways for Iteration
- Simplify customizing trip
- Allow for opt in of choices
- Build better guidance system for trip customization
- Increase text size for readability
- Make calls to action more prominent
Tier One Issues to Resolve:
Iterations need to have the trip customization broken out into sections and not confined to a separate modal. They need to be more front and center and allow for trip building guidance, go from A to B.
Base pricing and choices need to be made clearer and allow for more autonomy of choice on the site.
For readability type size needs to be at least 20px for body font and smaller/supplemental fonts need to be increased to at least 16px.
Project Next Steps
Next up for this project would be iteration and some A/B testing on the flow of the check out process. I would like to see if a reservation ticketing system would be easier to use or if a more traditional system with more save options would be better.
I am curious about how to streamline a very intense check out process for time travel which may incorporate multiple international trips for guests and gathering/uploading important documentation for travel and health.
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