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Travel, Responsive, Fictional

0. Background

Zeit is a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire. After a long struggle with Elon Musk, Virgin has been able to make time travel tourism available to all. Zeit is looking at me to create their new brand and set up an e-commerce responsive website in which they can sell travel packages at different times.

Challenge

Zeit is a fictional project about time traveling. It is challenging to do the secondary research and conduct the interview.

 

Research

1. Research

Research Goals

  • To study the pattern people researching and planning a trip

  • Discover the better approach to visualize potential destinations

  • Build the user’s trust for the product

  • Inspire users to find the next destination

 

Assumptions

  • People wasted too much time on searching for traveling information

  • Users concern about the reality won’t meet the expectation

  • Users find online information not reliable

Secondary Research

Market research,Competitors analyst,

 

Empathy Research

Indivisual interview + observation

Most people prefer to explore online while searching for destinations and booking for transportation. People prefer to do detailed research before traveling. Most people who book a tour online aged under 34. Women make most travel bookings. The desktop is still the most common platform for booking, but mobile searching is rising rapidly.

Market Research

 

Competitors Analyst​​

Interview

 

To get started, I first identified my target participants:

  • Experienced travelers from 27-60 years old

  • People who have habit booking online, maybe movie tickets, hotels, attraction tickets

  • People who are interested in history or classic arts, maybe archaeologists, researchers, or art history lovers.

The biggest difficulty is to get information without mentioning “time travel” because I wanted to focused on the core information, traveling booking. So I first asked questions about current problems when they travel in ordinary ways first. And then brought up some questions about time travel.

Participant A

Gender: Female

Age: 53

Occupation: Linguistic Professor

Dressing: Uniqlo comfortable sweatshirt, elastic pants, flat shoes

Scene: Just came back from the gym

Participant B

Gender: Male

Age: 30

Occupation: Analyst in Real Estate

Dressing: T-shirt, Short pants, casual shoes

Scene: Just finished dinner going home from work

Participant C

Gender: Female

Age: 27

Occupation: Electric Engineer

Dressing: Casual Business, flat shoes

Scene: On the way home, trying to book an Airbnb room for her birthday party

Empathy Map

 

Empathy Map Summary

 

Research Findings

 

Insights

  1. Travelers would love to get inspirations from trusted resources

  2. Travelers concern about the reliability of the information provided by booking websites

  3. People regard planning and researching as a time-consuming job

 

Needs

  1. Users need to feel confident when they get inspirations for the next destination 

  2. Users need to be presented with reliable information during their booking process

  3. Users need an efficient and convenient booking experience to save their time

Persona

 

Storyboard

 

Define

2. Define

Project Goals

 

Based on my secondary research and empathy research, I concluded some goals for business, users and technical.

Feature Roadmap

 

I created a list of features I would like to have and prioritize them according to my secondary research and empathy research

Card Sorting

 

First, I asked two of my previous participants for a 1:1 offline card sorting. And then I asked some other participants to give me an online card sorting on OptimalSort. 

  • Mozart's Vienna

  • Age of Samurai: Sengoku (the 1500s) Japan

  • Construction of the Taj Mahal, Agra, 1643

  • 1776 American declaration of independence from Britain (Philadelphia)

  • Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, August 28, 1963

  • Wright Brothers' First Flight, 1903

  • Watch the Berlin Wall fall November 9, 1989

  • Explore the lost city of Atlantis

  • Witness Apple iPhone unveiling, 2007

  • United Kingdom's Edwardian Era

  • Building the Great Wall of China

  • Loch Ness monster's birth

  • Beatlemania, 1963

  • Plato's Greece, 368 BC

  • Ancient Rome

  • Stone Age tribal life

  • California Gold Rush

  • Ancient China

  • Disneyland's opening day

  • Mongol Empire

  • Meiji Restoration of Japan

  • Building the Great Pyramid, Egypt

  • Vincent van Gogh's France

  • Filming Star Wars

  • VE Day celebration

  • Incan Peru, c. 1450

  • Building the Eiffel Tower

  • New York City, 1916 Armory Show

  • Shakespeare at the Globe, 1608

  • The Vikings discover North America

Key Findings​

  • 2/5 people use by dates

  • 3/5 people use specific systems including “landmarks” “events” or “eras”

  • 1/5 person uses by dates as the secondary category

  • 1/5 person uses “people” as one of the categories

Proposal

Chronology     Geography     Events     People     Interests

Interaction Design

Sitemap

 

Userflow

 

Homepage Design Sketches

 

Wireframes

 

Responsive UI

 

Paper Prototype

 

Design

3. Design

 

Logo Brainstorm

For the logo, I began with listing out some keywords for ZEIT, and I selected three of them to develop. I Google some images for my selected keywords for reference, abstract and sketch them out, and alter them digitally to fit ZEIT better.

Final Logo

Finally, I chose the third option which is modern and simple. The letter "I" in the final logo represents wormhole. 

UI Kit

I created the UI kit based on my previous brand tile. I hope my UI kit would represent futuristic and vintage characters for ZEIT.

High Fidelity Prototype

Desktop
Responsive UI
Test

5. Test

I interviewed four strangers in our community and our gym for my usability test.

 

I took some quick notes during the interviews. Then I summarize and digitize my hand notes into testing findings.

Test Completion Rate:

Participant 1: 75%

Participant 2: 75

Participant 3: 100%

Participant 4: 100%

 

Error Free Rate:

Participant 1: 50%

Participant 2: 75%

Participant 3: 80%

Participant 4: 90%

 

I created and document my affinity map based on my test findings, and referred to the affinity map from “Spotify”. I sort my findings by "Success", "Patterns", "Pain points" and "Recommendations". And next, I summarize the results by “Observations", "Insights" and "Priority for Recommendations"

Based on my previous usability test, I iterated my design. Please view the video below to see the final result.

Prototype

Interactive Header

Conclusion

ZEIT was a challenging project as my first UX/UI design work. I gained some precious experience on the interview and usability testing technics. The usability testing was successful because it helped me to iterate some interfaces that I did not realize as a problem. I would animate my header image into a flowing "time tunnel" if I had more time.

      Tools   Sketch, Invision, Photoshop, Illustrator

      Team   Alan Hurt (Product manager)

                  Heyi Wang (Designer)

Duration   80 Hours

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