Tours of the 6 Website Redesign case study
UI: Alyksandra Ackerman and Janice Kong
UX: Amelia Zhang & Drew Finley
Scope Overview
Tours of the 6 is a one of a kind tour company, offering fun and authentic walking tours in Toronto. Launched in 2017, the company has generated considerable press through its inventive Drake inspired branding. Despite the buzz, the branding in practice has been intimidating to non Drake fans and older millennials. The client wanted us to rethink their brand identity to retain its youthful edge but be more friendly and inclusive. It was also important to direct the brand away from Drake in order for the business to be sustainable. The usability of the site was also an important issue to address.

We kicked off the project with a comprehensive research process. This includes contextual inquiry through attending the 6ix tour and talking to its attendees. Conducting user interview and surveys to both previous tours of the 6ix attendees as well as the general target market of millennial travelers. We also examined competitors for good practices to learn from and pitfalls to avoid.

The Toronto tour competitive landscape is quite saturated. Though overwhelmingly general tours skew to an older demography. The Personalized/Younger quadrant that Tours of the 6 exists in is shared with businesses that don’t necessarily identify as tours however compete for the same target user’s attention/activities. Being the only tour company in this quadrant is something Tours of the 6 should leverage on. However from our millennial survey data has shown, millennial are less inclined to choose walking tours due to its ‘boring and older’ associations. Tours of the 6ix should in the short term focus on expanding to a slightly more age neutral market to make the business sustainable, however on the long term explore reinventing the traditional tour format (e.g. whether its tour content, or as an app/SaaS) to be relevant to the millennial traveller tapping into an untapped market.

We surveyed a big group of general millennial travelers. The most crucial insights we derived is that they have an old association with walking tours, a key objective for the redesign would be to counter these associations. Other key insights include how they plan a trip, this helped us focus on the channels into lead generation, making it important for us not only to rebrand the website but also the channels that direct us to it, trip advisor being a prominent one, create a consistent omni channel experience. The third aspect we focused on is what is the criteria for evaluation of millennial travelers. We needed our tour to fulfill this criteria of information in order to be choosed, it was important for us to provide ample social proof, as well as have CTAs designed in the process that would prompt recommending to friends.

Through user interviews with existing tour attendees as well as general millennial travelers we distilled the qualitative data into 2 user personas that summarize our typical user. Sarah the student is representative of our current target user, she is budget conscious. She is social media saavy and is interested in walking tours being a great way to get to know the city as well as share with her friends eye catching locations she otherwise might have missed on her own. When she is looking for a tour she wants a fun and engaging walking tour that might be a bit untraditional, different from your conventional stuffy school tour.

Through user interviews with existing tour attendees as well as general millennial travelers we distilled the qualitative data into 2 user personas that summarize our typical user. Sarah the student is representative of our current target user, she is budget conscious. She is social media saavy and is interested in walking tours being a great way to get to know the city as well as share with her friends eye catching locations she otherwise might have missed on her own. When she is looking for a tour she wants a fun and engaging walking tour that might be a bit untraditional, different from your conventional stuffy school tour.

Steven the Skeptic is another millennial traveller archetype we are keeping in mind whilst designing. Steven does not attend walking tours be cause he finds them to be generic and awkward. He is representative of the views of a dominant portion of millennial travelers. He finds going on guided tours lead to inauthentic touristy experiences. He is interested in the authentic, flexible and exploratory experience. Tours of the 6’s long term strategy is to design for this untapped market, that the tour industry target user is transitioning towards.


Through our research we derived 3 core objectives that served as guiding principles for designing the app.


After conducting extensive research to gain a thorough understanding of our user and market. To gain high level objective and user stories to guide the design process we began the process of creating the actual design for the website.

We started with improving the booking usability. The current website uses Bookeo to handle their booking, however there are many fundamental usability issues with it. We conducted a usability task analysis on the current site, discovering two critical pain points.
Bookeo has an extremely unintuitive user interface, most booking user flows ask the user to press the CTA and then fill out user information. However Bookeo requires the user to fill out participants information > book > fill out more user information. This unintuitive user flow runs counter to mental model users have and thus result in 90% of the users receiving an error message the first time they try to book.
The second main pain point is that they kept critical tour information such as in depth description of the tour, what to wear and bring, what to expect…etc. in the small info button next to the book CTA. In order to create a scannable website, crucial information should not be hidden in a small CTA. Because of this design decision only 6% of users were able to locate crucial tour information.

Solution
The solution was to transfer from Bookeo to Eventbrite. Evenbrite was a service employed by some existing competitors. It is very easy to use, integrates with facebook events and mail chimp, drives additional traffic through its event directory, can prompt user on questions during ticket registration, and has a great CMS.


The second objective we want to focus on is establishing trust through social proof. Through our user interviews and survey, millennial travelers ranked ratings and recommendation from friends as their highest criteria of choosing an activity. Thus we wanted to design the site to include ample social proof.
Despite receiving plenty of press, the original Tours of the 6 website did not include any of it on their website, for the redesign we have placed it on the front page of the site. Furthermore trip advisor ratings are also an important factor to establishing millennial trust, we also included the ratings and reviews from it. Furthermore making sure the press and reviews are clickable to external sites to boost the trustworthiness of them.

Our third objective: To show case a fun, urban yet friendly and inclusive brand image. Challenging the conventional drab walking tour image of Toronto was handled predominantly through visual design and a fun and friendly tone in writing copy. You can see the UI case studies by Janice Kong and Alyksandra Ackerman.
