Explore Now offers a community-based travel platform that enables its users to connect with like-minded, adventure-driven individuals to build tailor-made travel experiences.
A different approach to adventure travel. The concept of personal and exclusive experiences was the crucial differentiator for Explore Now. My challenge: Create a minimum valid product (MVP) to test this new concept of travel booking and build the end-to-end customer journey - from the inspiration stage, to the planning and in-destination phases - to launch of the MVP.
I initially conducted interviews with 8 adventure-type travellers and synthesised my findings by creating a journey map and an affinity map, as well as defined a set of ‘travel tribe’ personas. The journey map outlined key findings that later was used to inform the creation of the user flow for selecting and booking an experience. Affinity mapping helped me understand the patterns and find key insights from my interviews and testing.
I wanted to test the hypotheses quickly in oder to develop a prototype of the product and find out what potential travellers think, so I chose the methodology of Design sprints. Equipped with my research, I fleshed out the wireframes of the destination pages and created the visual user interface design across desktop + mobile. I performed heuristic reviews and usability testing with 5 people total.
This project included: Competitor Research, Interviews, Journey Mapping, Affinity Mapping and Personas, Design Sprints, Wireframing, User Interface Design, User Testing (customer experience) and Usability Testing (functionality and task-based user journeys).
Tailor-made travel experiences
Discover remarkable trips around the globe, designed just for you. Your adventure will be unique and packed with magical and authentic experiences.
The Adventure Traveller
Understanding the various nuances of travellers was key in this project. Creating personas, empathy maps, and user journeys helped me empathise with the ‘users’ — and highlighted the importance of approaching travellers based on their behaviours - rather than conventional demographics such as age or gender. I learned that some ‘traveller tribes’ tend to focus on self-indulgent travel that might combine luxury with self-improvement; other tribes value ease, convenience and simplicity in their travel planning above all else, and tend to ‘outsource’ their decision-making to trusted parties such as travel agents or personal planners to avoid having to go through extensive research themselves.
Understand the User
Explore Now focused on an entirely new tribe of travellers that demanded a deep understanding of this audience (on an almost personal level) in order to curate an experience that appeals to them on a very specific, personal level that goes above a traveller’s ‘norms’. It simply wasn’t enough to understand what adventure means to a particular traveller – it was about knowing what adventure means to that very individual traveller.
The Research
I used SurveyMonkey for some initial market research using feedback surveys. To gather more detailed qualitative data about potential travellers I conducted in-person interviews. To find respondents for the research I used a combination of social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook groups and forums) and explored the circle of friends, and friends of friends, and even engaged with participants in coffee shops (with the incentive of a free coffee). I asked a set of initial questions (see below) to build user profiles and understand motivational aspects, preferences and pain points and even concerns.
Increase User Engagement
Another interesting aspect I have discovered is that travellers used a lot of action verbs in their feedback and vocabulary - such as explore the world, discover new places, see where people are travelling, belong here, share my experience. I found this an interesting technique to move users from a passive mindset to an active state whilst exploring the site and get the reader immersed in the adventure from the start. Interaction engages users. Hence, a core element of this new travel concept was to build a section where ‘actual travellers’ could share their stories. The intent was to increase user engagement with the use of personal stories.
Make It Personal
The adventures of real people are always more interesting (and engaging) than a marketing brochure… Third-party validation is a great motivation for most travellers and adding social proof is a way that encourages users (potential travellers) to repeat the behaviour of their ‘tribe’. Reviews, ratings, comments, recommendations, blog posts and personal stories, all add personality to a site therefore introducing high-quality information your visitors can emotionally connect to.
User Testing
Based on the user stories, prioritising them and deciding what I can include as an MVP, I created the sitemap, started to draft wireframes on paper and later on, when the vision was more clear, I moved my ideas into Sketch. I used InVision to build the connections for further high fidelity prototype user testing.
App Design
In order to make sure the app created a sleek, trustworthy and immersive user experience, I focused on four key elements: transparency, minimalism, ease of use, and agility. A lack of trust and transparency can lead to bad reviews, low ratings, or even uninstalls. The challenge was to remove any distractions to a user’s attention away from building their experience and share their adventure with the ‘tribe’. The clean and minimalist interface needed to spark that wanderlust and to create a better experience.
The challenge
This form of adventure travel booking was built on one single premise: Trust. It was a huge challenge to build a platform that conveyed trust to book an experience based on community-driven experiences. The other challenge was to optimise the platform across web + mobile and remove barriers to signup and encourage site conversion.
Key takeaways
Price, trust and feeling safe are primary factors when deciding who to book an adventure trip with. Travellers rely heavily on reviews and photos. Travellers typically fall into either a sightseeing category or adventure category, however, these categories needed to be very granular for this project, categorising adventurers further into solo-travellers, thrill-seekers and self-improving adventurers.