Zeit aims to understand the customer's relationship with booking travel experiences and improve upon the overall experience, while considering the element of time travel. Zeit wants to consider challenges and benefits of the travel experience and give users the opportunity to search, filter, and select an experience in a simple way.
Taking this into consideration, I began to form my initial challenges and solutions for this project:
To begin defining the problem, I conducted a competitor analysis of the closest brands in the industry. It was a significant support for the product to identify the the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor and view both the website structure and organization of plans.
Interviews were conducted with 4 individuals ages 20 - 45 regarding booking travel experiences. They were asked how they go about looking for and booking travel, what they consider, what attracts them and what deters them from certain brands or products.
" I just want to find good deals, enjoy my trip and
not have to think about the booking process "
- Interview Participant
Card sorting was conducted to identify how users categorize trip types. Since the options were all destinations of the past, I wanted to identify patterns in how users organized events to identify how they may approach booking travel.
Trends I found helped me to learn that users were quicker to select and categorize music and arts events and seemed unsure how to categorize other historical events.
After discovering more about the users, I facilitated information architecture through the creation of a sitemap. The card sorting exercise helped me discover how people would group information on the site.
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Creating the user flow helped me understand the process of finding travel events and later informed my design decisions. User flows helped me to map clarify how a user may want to navigate through a travel booking site.
Taking what I knew about the users, their needs and what the product provides, I drew up a few sketches to represent the significant aspects of the brand. I wanted to ensure certain aspects stayed consistent, such as the CTAs, additional features and a simple layout.
I began forming a brand for Zeit, a company that evoked creativity, adventure, and trustworthiness in its identity. Starting with logo design, I went on to make a complete style guide and UI kit.
I selected these colors because I they complemented the brand image. The muted colors are meant to give the user a sense of comfort and security when navigating a product that they are unfamiliar with.
I took some of the sketch designs, the branding, the sitemaps, the user flows and all the data I gathered up until this point and created low-fidelity wireframes for Zeit.
First, I created the responsive homepage based on feedback from users in the research phase. Some of the considerations were: allowing users to search events/destinations directly on homepage, browse experiences to pair with trips, and see popular destinations.
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After reviewing some of the options, features, and navigation capabilities laid out on the lo-fi wireframes, I made slight improvements to the hi-fi wireframes.
During the testing phase, my aim was to determine the most significant improvements I could make to the site as well as the users ability to navigate and understand the site.
I conducted user testing interviews on 5 people, utilizing the mid-fidelity wireframes, while trying to identify their positive and negative interactions.
After completing user testing interviews, I gained some insight into what was useful, and what are the challenges of navigating and using the site.
Some of the trends I noticed:
After completing the design process for Zeit, I'v not only learned a lot about the travel/event space but also the process of designing for complex product. Through Zeit, I attempted to design a process for an experience that doesn't exist by creating an efficient process that users would be familiar with.
If I could do anything differently, I would conduct more user testing to determine how users may navigate a process like this in order to develop a system that is simple to understand. Conducting research for time travel was a major pain point.
It has been both a challenging and rewarding experience designing for Zeit. Ultimately, my favorite aspect of the project is getting to see how others react to the idea of time travel itself, and the niche area that Zeit delivered while getting to see others interacting with the final product.