ZEIT TRAVEL
E-COMMERCE SITE

Services

brand identity
web design
user experience
usability

My Role

researcher
designer
time traveler

Time Span

six weeks

Tools

figma
flux capacitor

ZEIT PROTOTYPE

what I learned

Beyond creating my own rules for time travel and a greater appreciation for specific movies / tv shows, this experience allowed me to grow substantially in my approach to the research process - and how important it is to include the user in that. While being a fictional task, the project provided similar principles to that of a present-day travel company.

Couple of "golden nuggets" gained through this sprint:

Designs aren't everything - while pretty, it's the foundation and structure that holds it all together and leads to success. Research and connecting with actual users is what it all comes down to.
Wireframes. Wireframes. Wireframes - grids were my arch-nemesis starting out (still not besties), but both my understanding and dependence on them grew as we progressed.
Folks don't always read the instructions - which means my designs and presentation need to clearly share what's possible with many routes to get there.
People want simple when it comes to travel - through research and interviews, it became apparent that users desired simple, easy, and clearly-priced experiences when it comes to planning their trips.

the background

Zeit, a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire, is looking to design their new brand and set up an e-commerce responsive website so they can sell travel packages and tickets to different times. Zeit wants to make the selling of the tickets as easy as possible being that their travel offerings are a bit restricted and limited.

Our purpose is to create an experience that provides the user a seamless browsing to booking experience that eases any hesitations made possible with time travel.

the problem

Users want to book a time travel trip and know that it’s safe. How can one create the safety-net for booking a time travel trip through a site’s aesthetics / design and create a shared trustworthiness no matter the journey or time period? That's what we're gonna find out.

the solution

Create a site that is simple to navigate, research, and book a trip; doesn’t have hidden charges; and offers all-inclusive trips that take the worry out of planning, traveling, and spending time on vacation.

To build a brand and experience that travelers find comfort, safety, and reassurance that this is a vacation that is different from anything else out there.

research

I began the journey starting with comparative research in similar / related fields.

Working with a fictional time-travel company made me think creatively in connecting booking sites, trip brokers, and comic book and movie refrences when it came to the time travel aspects.

findings

interviews

Following that initial research within the world of travel, I was able to craft a world-class script for interviewing folks within my circle of influence - two in-person and one remotely. Their responses and collected information would then shape what would become our primary persona, Amber.

FURTHER FINDINGS

foundations

Interviews helped in creating a path to better understanding the cross-section between user goals, business goals, and technical considerations when moving forward.

Using Optimal Workshop, a card sorting study was coordinated with a total of 10 participants using 20 cards on August 23 .

Participants ranged from 23 - 37 years of age;  averaged 5:49 in completing the study;  90% from the US; 10% from Canada.

This helped provide a good baseline of organization seeing how participants categorized liked items within the same or similar labels. There wasn’t a lot to standardize, however, time travel based items were generally grouped together; as were trip booking items; and things concerning the actual act and safety of time travel.

The dendrogram analysis helped me visualize how people generally grouped items together and from that what routes I could take in creating a site map, navigations, and where potential pages could be placed.

I really like dendrograms and how I can see what people were thinking in spite of the many categories created - that they each had similar thought processes in how they approached things. User input greatly supplied the proceeding routes in the journey as we moved towards the site map and wireframes.

wireframes

The wireframing process was a great exploration and foundation for this designer - taking all the research, interviews, and tests into account.

Specfic pages were chosen based on the provided site map and user flows.

Making sure pages remained simple, clean, and understandable - were highly valuable goals with persona and interview perspectives.

These wireframes (and a new-found respect for grids) became the baseline for what would become Zeit's developing website.

style

This portion of the process is my favorite as everything done so far begins to take shape digitally - through branding, style choices / inspirations, and what will ultimately play into the site's overall design.

Taking inspirations from 60's travel posters, the time travel show, "Loki," and a retro-futuristic sense of style - all helped to create the design direction supporting the simplicity of "modern meets historical" and what users we're longing for in their travel experiences.

hi-fi

The original homepage can be found here.

Following hi-fi designs, a prototype was built in Figma and usability testing commenced.

Usability testing was done through a mix of remote-only and remote-moderated tests through Maze, Otter.ai transcriptions, and built with two scenarios - to favorite a family-friendly cruise and to book a trip to the moon with rover add-on.

Most were able to complete tasks when moderated, however, some kinks in the prototype led to pain points when remote-only.

Usability results here.

next steps:

Continue to iterate based on the usability testing results, feedback provided, affinity mapping, and prioritization matrix.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Pour more into the safety-side of time travel based on our problems and solutions.
Never stop never stopping.