Introduction
This was a concept project for Intrepid Travel. Intrepid Travel is a group travel company based in Australia that caters to the traveler that wants to travel solo but not alone. Intrepid sends over 100,000 travelers a year on adventures around the world. With over 800 destinations in Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, the Arctic and Antarctica. Currently Intrepid’s core clientele is young travelers in their 20’s. Market research indicates however that there is a huge market for an older demographic. Currently the older demographic finds it hard to navigate the site and find trips that are geared toward their comfort level. For this project I worked with two teammates to market toward this older demographic and simplify the process of finding the right trip for their needs.
Research Process
We began by doing a competitive analysis with two other group travel companies and Expedia. From this we concluded that Intrepid’s website was fairly easy to navigate and book trips. We then did a journey map of the site and our original conclusion changed. We realized the navigate was not as good as we originally thought and we were able to identify the pain points of the site. We then had two people in our age demographic go through the site as if they were booking a trip. This helped us further identify the pain points of the site.
Once we identified the pain points of the site we moved on to our user research. We created a survey of nine questions that we distributed online We also conducted one user interview. We synthesized this data using affinity mapping. By doing this we were able to come up with our problem statement, solution statement and user persona.
Problem Statement: Seniors want to book group travel adventures through Intrepid’s website, but they are having a hard time finding trips geared toward their needs.
Solution Statement: Design a theme page for Intrepid that caters to the preferences of travelers over the age of 50.
User Persona: Jerri Sheffield is a 56 year old recent divorcee from St. Paul, MN. Looking to rediscover her independence, Jerri is looking to book a group travel trip to Croatia that caters to her preferred comfort level.
Design Process
We were undecided on what we wanted our design to look like so we did a design studio. During this process we came up with several ideas. We found that collectively we had a similar vision for the way we wanted the site to look. We then choose our favorite elements from each others sketches and put them together to create our design. From these sketches we were able to create our user flow and site map.
After completing our medium fidelity wireframes we did some usability testing. The feedback from this round of testing was positive for the most part. It helped us identify the aspects of our design that were causing confusion amongst our users. We went back and addressed these issues while creating our high fidelity prototype. We did another round of usability testing and found that we had resolved the previous issues. The feedback from this round was highly positive.
Conclusion
While working on this project we discovered that most people in our age demographic use iPads. For future iterations of this project I would like to develop a design for the iPad to further cater towards our target demographic.
Prototype
