Azulik: an Eco-Luxury Travel Company
PROJECT: Azulik Website ROLE: Team Lead DURATION: Ongoing
Project Vision
Azulik is a luxury travel website which specializes in bespoke and highly unique experiences custom-tailored to the client.
Challenges
1) Eliminate barrier to entry upon website opening
2) Design a cohesive interface for familiar and unfamiliar users
3) Create a minimalistic UI while keeping services as the focus
4) Provide a seamless & linear booking experience
Kickoff
In this project, we took a goal-directed design approach that proved to be quite effective in our design efforts. We found qualitative research methods to be the most useful, consisting of a kickoff meeting, literature review, competitive analysis, stakeholder interviews, and most important our persona hypothesis construction. We started out by asking ourselves some initial key questions.
"What is the product and who is it for?"
"What do our primary users need most?"
"Which users are the most important to the business?"
"What challenges could we face moving forward?"
"Who do we see as our biggest competitors?"
"What literature should we review to familiarize ourselves?"
Mapping
We found data from our initial user interviews to be the most effective understandings we garnered. We then used an affinity diagram to separate the data into groups of tasks which were further categorized by high level goals for improvement in usefulness, confusion, getting started, tone, checkout process, needing a space to specify details, and adding bouquet to cart. Recognizing the conflicts of interest from each audience allowed us to focus on shaping user goals and how those goals would in-turn also affect the business' goals.
The Users
Competitive Analysis
We looked at several potential competing companies, some of which were direct competitors and some of which were indirect. We looked at competitors’ type and quality of product, market positioning, strengths and weaknesses, and overall tone.
The companies we analyzed included:
A few of our key takeways were that the majority of our competitors:
Had very difficult-to-navigate website
Didn’t offer specialty experiences
Lacked strong branding throughout their website/app
Employed a casual, conversational tone
Had a good selection of services but they were not easy to browse
Pen and Paper Wireframes
Wireflow
After sketching out some p&p wireframes and thinking through the preliminary flow, we reviewed what was nessecary, unessecary , and what areas needed improvement. We poured a lot of our time into this step to make sure we had the finishing touches on the underlying UX before moving onto the visuals.
Iterations
After creating our prototype from low fidelity wireframes, our team prepared a 16 question survey for participants to fill out before we began conducting a usability test. We asked participants to run through different scenarios in our prototype in hopes of garnering enough feedback to use for our next set of design iterations. What we found was:
Users wanted to be able to list their specifications, including special requests for their trip.
Users wanted to be updated on the status of their upcoming trip.
Users wanted to be able to quickly browse best deals on trips.
We then built our first iterations of high-fidelity mockups. We then went through a second round of user interviews to further streamline our app, where we found:
Users wanted to be able to edit/delete part of their trip.
Users had a hard time contacting someone from the website.
Takeaways
As a travel enthusiast, Azulik is an idea that is near and dear to my heart. I wanted to communicate the importance of expressing yourself through different creative outlets. This was my first time using the goal-directed design process, and I can definitely see it being useful in future projects. The idea of honing in on the persona hypothesis creation to help further the goals of not only the user, but the business is a step that I had taken for granted up until now. I learned that if you design for exclusively the business' goals, it will most likely fail; this seems to be especially true in shopping apps and websites.