The Adventure Trip To Arctic Region
A UX Design Case Study for the Responsive Web Design of Polar Outfitting
Alex Flaherty, A resident of Nunavut, Canada. started a company called “Polar Outffititng”.Currently, he lives in Iqaluit but originally he is from Grise Fiord which is more further north of Iqaluit.
Next question, what does Polar Outfitting do? In simple words, it’s an outdoor adventure company that provides trips to such areas and places that a normal person cannot easily dare to do by himself.
Polar Outfitting specializes in providing Once in a lifetime experience in the true Canadian Arctic Region. It can be simple as viewing beautiful Northern Lights to full excited thrill experience in Baffin Islands.
What makes this company even more outstanding is that they not only provide amazing adventure trips but they also have great emphasis on employing the local community especially the local people of Inuit. Their motto is also to showcase and promote their unique culture to tourists. One of the very famous traditions often enjoyed by tourists is their throat singing!
Our Team
This project was assigned to us at Red Academy Toronto. We were a team of 4 UX Designer and 1 UI Designer. It was a very exciting opportunity for me to own something very different this time. Since the client Alex lives way up north from where we are sitting (Toronto), it was completely remote work.
Research & Planning Process
As a UX Designer, the process of research and planning is extremely important. This helps us to lay down a very strong concrete foundation where we can see what we are expecting from this project and what our client wants from us. After our meeting with Alex, we came to the conclusion that he is looking to completely rehaul his current website and to make it more modern, understandable, easy to approach and also responsive.
Our process started by creating & deploying our surveys. We also did an In-person interview to better understand what our people actually think about an adventure trip in the Canadian Arctic Region.
We found some interesting survey responses.
- Age group between 40–61 wants to take this trip as they like to explore new destinations.
- Age group between 31–40 wants to take at least once in a lifetime experience.
- Both of the ages want to see comprehensive information about tour packages & are willing to spend.
- They want to have more channels to communicate with a tour company,
As a matter of fact, these trips are highly time orientated they happen on certain seasons & times in a year.
We also found out that our survey respondents got confused with a word of “Outfitting”. However, the Older demographic understood very well what does “Outfitting” means but our younger audience had different thoughts like it could be something about Clothing.
We also performed Competitive & Comparative Analysis & Heuristic Evaluation. We decided to choose some direct & In-direct competitors in the market. This helped to understand more about our current client website in terms of what feature they are lacking and what kind of new feature we can implement during our UX design process.
After conducting our research we moved to the next stage. In our Planning process, with the help of an Affinity Diagram, we start bringing down our survey results. It helps to understand key points that users are trying to get from a trip/tour.
Another part of the UX process is to build a potential User Persona. In our case, we designed 2 personas; a Primary & a Secondary. Why do we do these primary and secondary? Because it helps to narrow a specific potential target user. By doing that we can easily understand their journey and interests. We use there key points like pain points, must-haves, like to do, etc. This helps to design a User Journey Map where you can address all of their points in a form of journey.
This is what we concluded so far
- There should be more ways of communication (phone, email or an online request form)
- Enough information about the trip should be provided. This will help the user to better understand what he is looking for
- The current website of our client is lacking in a wide area like there are not enough trip options visible
Before moving on to the design stage, we had a list of things that we aimed to address in this phase. I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that these trips are highly customizable and time-dependent and can only happen during certain times of the year.
Design Phase
This is the best part of the UX Design process, where you can implement all your ideas & work with your teammates to deliver the best design. We all had different ideas for all our lo-fi’s. We sat together & brainstormed to make a final Lo-Fi design…
Before actually starting the Lo-Fii’s, We did the Feature Priozirization. In this, we categorized all the possible features of our website. By doing so we could easily understand our Quick Wins, Major Features, Nice to Haves and Reconsiders — based on the effort and impact.
After finalizing our features, we designed our Site Map & User Flow. All these are part of the design process. They help us to a lot in our Lo-Fi skating process.
Moving through the steps, we were then able to finalize our Lo-Fi’s & moved them to the next stage of the Mid-Fi’s wireframes. Our Mid-Fi went through some major changes during our design process. I would like to discuss some of those changes in our Usability Testing Phase.
Usability Testing
After finalizing our Mid-Fi’s we moved to our testing phase. It's a very crucial step to understanding our design, it should be easy to navigate & all the respective content must be understandable so that it allows us to test our design on real users to see if our design intent was realized. Some of the major changes we have done:
- Sticky Info & Button — issue:
‘Quick facts’ and ‘Start Reservation’ disappears as you scroll down the page, which makes it hard for users to have a consistent reference to info, and know where to go to start the reservation process.
after testing: this section now stays in view as you scroll down, always easily visible/clickable - Intuitive forms and content— issue:
when filling out forms, it should be clear that you cannot submit until all the fields are entered
after testing: buttons are grayed-out and only because clickable once the form is filled out.
issue: lack visual clarity such as checks to show ‘included’ and exes to show ‘not included’ items, icons that make sense
after testing: added these visual elements
Final Verdict
After making all the changes, we delivered Mid-Fi to our UI team members. She did an amazing job to bring our greyscale design to a more attractive colorful design.
This was my 6th and final client project at Red Academy. It’s been an amazing journey at Red & working with all these clients. This helped me understand that every project requirement is not the same even though the whole process is the same.
