Meet the founders of ReTrip, three friends that came together with the goal of creating an app that would allow travelers looking for a guided tourist experience that felt personal, authentic, and unique.
ReTrip makes tourism feel less commercialized by linking travelers with local guides who are able to show the hidden secrets of a city allowing for a tourist experience that always feels exciting and new.
The first step was to sit down with the team at ReTrip and determine the scope of the task, better understand the needs and wants of their end users, the current problem, and how could a successful outcome be determined.
Coming up with an interface re-design that offers a seamless navigational experience for users who wish to book a guided tour with ReTrip.
How might I design an intuitive and user friendly interface that focuses on the needs and wants of ReTrip’s targeted audience.
The team had already done extensive research on their potential users and managed to provide the following insights.
The first step was to conduct interviews with the team in order to better understand how ReTrip wanted to position itself as a brand and the particular audience it wanted to target.
Travelers between the ages of 21-40, tech savvy, require structured tourism want unique experiences & to support the locals.
Tone of voice is to be informative yet not too serious, casual yet confident, familiar. should sound light hearted and positive.
Sociable, creative, positive, enthusiastic, inspiring, trendy, fun, outgoing, explorative
After extracting insights from the research and establishing the apps brand direction it was time to analyze other competing apps to determine what aspects of their product worked well for their users, what could be improved, lastly what could be taken advantage of.
An online travel agency that works with local operators, connecting travelers with tours & activities.
An online travel information web application for reviews, forums & bookings.
A platform for finding and building local communities, meet new people, learn new things.
Finding local tour guides that offer an unique authentic experience is difficult to find. Users feel frustrated dealing with long and complicated booking processes and desire a simplified process.
ReTrip will measure success in this project when they see an increase of users booking trips on their platform.
With the data collected and the insights extracted I was able to come up with two personas who I thought best represented ReTrips user base.
With the personas created it was time to visualize the journeys each user would take. This would help identify any pain points, theorize the supposed steps taken and pin point any opportunities that could help improve the app.
It was then time to go into greater depth and map out the users flow when interacting with the app. This would help visualize the steps a user would take towards completing an objective and any pain points that may exist within this flow.
After identifying the users wants and needs then establishing their behavior's, it was time to put together a sitemap that would help structure the app and provide an idea of how each page could be efficiently navigated through.
Once the initial research had been completed it was time to improve upon existing design concepts. The aim was to redesign ReTrip’ s interface in a way that it would be more user-friendly. The goal was to make discovering then booking guided tours a fluid and enjoyable experience.
It was important to create a home screen that was both inviting and informative when the user landed upon it. The aim here was to create a visually appealing easily navigable design that would keep the users attention.
The map’s main purpose was to allow users to see what tours were available in their vicinity, to quickly scan through the different categories, then to be able to make a booking with little friction involved.
The explore page would become the main area of discovery, allowing users to see additional information via the cards, view the type of tours and how they were made available ranked in popularity.
The next step was to conduct usability tests to gauge how users interactive with the app and to see if we could spot any errors or inconstancies in these early stages.
Insights were collected during the usability tests then were analyzed using Jakob Nielsen’s severity rating scale.
Tour cards were changed to a portrait style design as it was noted that tour guides would be more inclined to upload photos of their tours in a portrait style format
Test subjects felt that the original design lacked transparency, difficult to determine what dates & times were available. The new design made it faster and easier to pick available dates.
Subjects noted that they felt there was a lack of information about the tour’s requirements. The design was improved and consolidated into the same slide with date availability to reduce the number of clicks needed to book.
ReTrip’s color palette and typography aimed to give the interface a warm and inviting feel that associated itself with exploration, excitement and anticipation. We wanted the users to feel a sense of excitement when booking their tours.
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Working with the team at ReTrip was an amazing experience. Through collaboration with the stakeholders and following the companies brand guidelines I was able to Improve the initial design, creating a prototype that was both user-friendly, visually appealing and on brand. User testing allowed me to make informed iterations based on the feedback which further enhanced Retrip’s interface.
As ReTrip is still in its startup phase there is still plenty of room for another round of testing and iterations based on the results. Once this has been accomplished the next step will be to collaborate with the developers to ensure that the process of bringing the app to life runs smoothly.
If you get a chance let me know what you think or if you’re interested in working together you can contact me by email or LinkedIn.
