LOADING•••

redefining travel experience for three distinct users

Role
Project Lead, Research, UI Design, Prototyping, Usability Testing, FrontEnd.

Company
Last Door Solutions

Type & Timeline
4months / Web App / 2019

Tools
Invision, Sketch, Miro, Google Meet, Zoom, Basecamp, Hotjar

🏔️ About the Project

While being at Last Door, I’ve worked with a ton of travel and tour operators in Nepal. This is one of my favorite project as it had a lot of missing links between users and the product, and connecting them was challenging for me to find and meet the needs for multiple user bases.

Discovery World Trekking(DWT) is a pioneering travel agency based in Nepal. They had been serving travelers from Europe, Australia, the US, and other western countries. Unfortunately, the DWT website had an inferior information architecture, and the team needed help to have a tiered payment from the client. In addition, the crew wanted their travelers' information to be handy and onboard them smoothly when they arrived in Nepal.

🔍 Exploring the Problem

  • Current users couldn’t pay and book the trip from their site.
  • Agent and group trips can only pay/book the trip manually.
  • Manual work load to plan the custom trips for extreme users.
  • Lack of a systemized traveler onboarding to the website and destination, both created issues in handling business.

🏹 Project Approach

🔬 Secondary Research

Tourism is a sizable industry in Nepal. According to the data from Ministry of Tourism–Nepal, around 70% of tourists are from India, US, china, UK and Europe. Upon analyzing the current site, we see that US, China and Europe are our audience. Plus, major activities that tourists perform includes trekking, mountain climbing, bird watching, kayaking, canyoning, etc. Major local competitors utilize their web-presence and the metadata to acquire customers and build trust.

🎙️ Stakeholder & User Interviews to understand business goals, user pain points and define technical requirements

Next, I conducted multiple, semi-structured stakeholder interviews and user interviews. I took interviews of tour guides, business owner, past trekkers (who booked their trip through the site), B2B tour agents, Webmaster (who was taking care of the past site for 3 years). Talking with different associates of the product helped me understand the perspectives and pain points of each user and business.

Business goals

  • Enable agents/users to invite more travelers to the site.
  • Generate cash flow through online bookings.
  • Enable multiple pricing tiers, discounts based on group size, etc.
  • Hook recurring travelers to the website and collect reviews.
  • Eliminate the manual work for bespoke trips and reduce the time to confirm bookings.
  • Allow users to print every trip information available online to increase brand’s reach.

User needs & Pain points

  • Access to clear and detail oriented day-to-day information.
  • Hassle-free online booking.
  • Frustrating booking experience due to confusing payment channel, misunderstandings due to lack of post-booking communication.

Technical requirements

  • Live search to browse through more than 200 trips, that are similarly named.
  • Progressive web app, for service worker offline caching and to render the website and be able to use in the phone for agents.
  • Highly scalable
  • Custom dynamic meta-data tools for SEO.
  • CDN and server-side caching for media and content.
  • User registration & Sign in, Wishlist, etc.
  • Adventure club for rewards and discount with tiers for retaining the extreme travelers and agents.

💁‍♀️ The Target Audience

According to secondary research, WFH employees, office workers, and students are the people who are most affected by incorrect sitting posture.

  • Travelers interested in trekking, hiking and adventurous activities.
  • B2B travel agencies and tour operators.
  • Family and premium trekkers

💭 Questions

  • How might we enable travelers to book an online travel experience with their companions?
  • How might we make it easier for the travelers to choose best bespoke tours?
  • How might we enable travelers to access their trip information easily?
  • How might we connect travel agents with business to recruit B2B travelers?

💬 Solution(s)

  • A travel club where the users can enroll, create their travel account, invite their travel companions, pay through different mediums, become a travel agent, get discounts, save their trips, etc.
  • A dynamic live search that allows informed users to browse through their interested trips quickly and access the trip information.
  • The bespoke travel experience form facilitates the users to select with thorough information and narrow down their needs to create a unique experience.
  • I refined the information architecture to browse hundreds of trips with filters for categories, location, type of tour, and trip relations.
  • Incorporated dynamic reviews from multiple streams to build trust among users, including Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and custom video reviews.

User Persona(s)

Following the research and interviews, I defined the user and identified their needs, goals, and frustrations.

Feature List

  • Live search accommodate huge directory of trips and trip information.
  • User login / management.
  • Multiple payment systems with partial / full paymentoptions.
  • Automated emails, downloadable PDFs.
  • Mailchimp Integration
  • Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Facebook Reviews, Tripadvisor, etc. API integration.

Visual Design

View the live site: https://discoveryworldtrekking.com/