💼 UX Case study «Travel stories»
#Columbery
In 2016–2018 I was working in the B2C travel startup
Our goal was to popularize «unique travel experiences, rather than touristy». Here is a case study from one of the products we’ve tested.
📍Context:
🗄 Design a concept: «Share your stories, book others’ stories»
📆 Year: January 2018
🗂 Project scope: Business & product strategy, user testing, conceptualizing, Information architecture, usability testing
🎯Target user: Two groups of travelers: Cultural Purists & Bloggers
⏱ Timing: 1 month
📍Concept:
- Bloggers create a blog to post stories about the most unique places they’ve discovered abroad
- They receive «Token rewards» that they can spend on experiences from others for $0
- This attracts their audience to the platform («Cultural Purists»)
- Purists discover a hub with «non-touristy content», bookmark it, buy it and even start writing own stories
📍Business hypothesis:
➡️ «Can unique stories be monetized?»
➡️ «Can travelers find unique places through other’s stories and buy them?»
➡️ «Can it become a hub of «unique stories» or travelers will write «anything for a sake of reward?»
Target users:
➡️ Cultural Purists seek for an opportunity to immerse themselves in an unfamiliar culture and engage sincerely with a different way of living.
➡️ Bloggers choices are shaped by beautiful sights and quirky attractions. They’re used to heavily discounted, personalized offers.
📍Architecture: 41 screens / 6 scenarios:
1️⃣ About: Platform, About experiences, About Stories
2️⃣ Experiences: Select by area, About experience, Booking
3️⃣ Stories: Select by category, Read and save or buy the story
4️⃣ Start your story: My country or My trip, tory Cheatlist, Settings, Preview, Draft, Publish
5️⃣ My cabinet: I bought, I published, I drafted, Saved stories
6️⃣ Settings
📍Principle concept solutions:
➡️ Blog-like layout. Cultural Purists prefer web solutions to take their time for reading and saving
➡️ The dashboard layout (to ensure the idea of «HUB» with different functions»)
➡️ Progressive onboarding and guided videos on each page (to ensure understanding of each function)
➡️ Modularity. «Column drop» layout allows easily switch to mobile web versions with no changes for design
➡️ Decision path principle on each page (Goal > Decision > Trust > Action)
📍Mockup:
🖥 Click below to walk through experience:
📍Usability testing goal was to understand:
➡️ «Does the user gets the idea?
➡️ «Will spendable tokens and free experiences motivate bloggers to create stories?»
➡️ «Should experiences search be by location and stories by categories?»
📍UT results (from 10 testers):
1️⃣Users described ideas as Blog + Expedia. In general, they got and liked it
2️⃣ Only 20% of users understood that they can earn «Spendable tokens». The rest didn’t understand what is «CMLB»
3️⃣Users were confused about the Stories and Experiences pages. They looked identical
4️⃣We were unable to understand whether they’ll write unique stories or «anything», only build product testing will show
📍Next steps:
➡️ Prioritize insights
➡️ Build better solutions to meet all business goals
➡️ UT new solutions
