Zeit

Project Background

Zeit is a fictional enterprise belonging to the Virgin family of companies. The company has developed technology that makes time travel tourism possible and are now preparing for a public launch. My role on the project covered two areas:

Establish the company's brand identity.

Develop a responsive ecommerce website for selling travel packages.

Research

To determine what features Zeit's new site would require, I first needed to familiarize myself with the features of competitor travel sites and gather insight into travelers' experience with those sites. My research had three facets:

• Competitor site analysis
• A general survey (for identifying behavioral trends)
• 1-on-1 follow-up interviews (for benchmarking emotional experience of the booking process)

Key Findings

Travelers have a strong preference for doing their own research.

Travelers are generally willing to pay more to have more included.

Strong preference for booking travel online, mostly through 3rd party websites.

Travelers show a preference for guidebooks by authors they trust and testimonials from friends.

Strong desire to have a tangible experience of places they've read about in books or seen on TV.

Reviewing insights and trends discovered in my research, I crafted a central persona to keep track of my target user group and their needs as I developed the site.

Creating Information Architecture

Now that I better understood my target user group I could move on to considering the functionality of the site. Ultimately the website would serve as a portal of information about available trips and this info would need to be easily accessible. It was time for more user research, now focused on how users would sort real information. I created an open card sort activity using sample trip ideas and compared participant responses to find common groupings and categories.

Key Takeaways

Results from the card sorting activity and user research were used to create a provisional site map, the thoroughness of which was evaluated by working up several hypothetical user flows for booking travel on the site.

Designing the UI

With structure in place, it was time to develop the brand's visual identity. It started with a logo and evolved over several iterations into a style guide and eventually a full UI Kit. I wanted to create a warm, inviting look that still felt modern and clean.

Testing and Iteration

Structure? Check. Great style? Check. Now it was time to make sure that the way the website worked made sense. I specifically wanted to test out the discovery filter system users would use to find trips they are interested in. To do this, I created full-fidelity page mockups and built a basic, clickable prototype in InVision. I ran a remote, unmoderated test using the Maze platform and reviewed the results to chart needed improvements. View the prototype here.

Key Takeaways

The filters are easy to use and perform as expected. The filter reset button is intuitive, but could use a label for better clarity.

Participants are excited to explore the site and trip details. +1 for engagement score!

Some elements need to be resized for better utilization of screen space.

Key Feedback for Iteration

• Change the shape of the filter buttons to make them more rounded. Doing this would help to further indicate that they are clickable elements, further differentiating them from the surrounding UI elements.
• Rework the filter dropdown into a consolidated menu for all filters for easier editing of filter settings.
• Rework the filter button labels to better account for edge cases (what happens when a name is longer than the button is wide, etc.)

Conclusions

With more time on this project there are several exciting directions I would have liked to go:

• Development of a map search tool with a basic prototype (search trips on a map with time slider)
• Expand the "How It Works" section to include FAQ, support, etc.
• Build a checkout flow to demonstrate ease of use for customers
• Conduct more expansive user testing to develop secondary personas for future development
• Mobile development and prototyping