INTREPID TRAVEL
Interest-based tour suggestions and recommendations.
Project
With close to 1,000 itineraries in over 120 countries, Intrepid Travel is the world's largest small group adventure travel company. Myself along with three others worked together on improving the experience of finding and booking a tour on the Intrepid Travel mobile site.
Platform
Mobile
Year & Timeline
2018 / 2 weeks
Role
UX/UI Design, Prototype
Travel preference questionnaire
Users can now select their tour preferences in a short questionnaire and Intrepid will then recommend tours best suited for the individual based on those preferences.
Accommodation detail
Users can now view photos of the accommodations each day of their tour.
Travel style & theme on tour detail page
Trip Style and Trip Theme are now explained on the tour detail page on how they apply to that specific tour.
Travel styles explained
Compare all the different Travel Styles from right on the homepage.
Design process
Initial research
In order to get a better understanding of the problems users were facing with booking a tour on Intrepid Travel, we decided to send out a questionnaire as well as conduct a site audit to see if any patterns emerged.
Intrepid user reviews
Tour-taker interviews
Our team interviewed a total of 8 individuals who had all booked a tour through a tour company in the past. The goal of these interviews was to get a better understanding of what both positive and negative experiences these individuals had during the tour-booking process. Some questions we asked included:
“What was the most difficult part of finding and booking your tour?”
“What was the easiest part of finding and booking your tour?”
“What would have made the finding and booking experience better?”
Takeaways
People did not really enjoy the amount of time it took to find a tour. On average they said they spent 2+ weeks researching different tours on different sites before they finally decided to book.
When users rated a tour favorably there was an overwhelming trend of users mentioning their tour guide. When users rated negatively, the feedback would mention the Travel Theme not living up to their expectations as well as an overwhelming amount of people not satisfied with the accommodations.
Problem
Nielsen research found that the average traveler spends 53 days visiting 28 different websites over a period of 76 online sessions in order to plan and book a trip. With close to 1,000 tour options to choose from, Intrepid users are having difficulty sorting through all the options available to find the right tour and when they do decide on a tour, their expectations are not being met.
Secondary research
By completing a competitive analysis of top-performing companies in the same space, we were able to see how and if they were addressing the issues that Intrepid users were having.
HMW statement
How might we narrow the amount of results to show the tours most closely related to the users’ needs and wants?
User flow
The goal was to reduce the amount of steps a user needs to take in order to find a tour. By looking at the existing user flow we were able to propose the addition of the Travel Quiz which would eliminate the need to filter through as many results.
CURRENT
Beginning to design
PROPOSAL
By using what we learned through the research, we were able to create a set of low-fidelity wireframes to see how we could effectively include all the items that would help to achieve our goal.
Testing
Iterations
To get a better idea of what the prototype would need, we conducted a usability test with a few participants and continued to develop and refine our overall idea through this user feedback. By asking questions about the participant’s overall experience on how easy or difficult the task was, we were able to then apply that same feedback to improve the overall design.
By conducting a usability test with our prototype, we were able to learn which features of our prototype were confusing or inconvenient. An example of this was originally having photos associated to each questionnaire item. Users not able to see all items under each category and as a result were scrolling back and forth.