A responsive site for a local small business aiming to establish an online presence to provide context to the services offered and attract more clients.
Product Designer
3 weeks
Splendid Holidays is a small travel agency business located in Chinatown, San Francisco that primarily serves the local community. Most if not all services can be offered remotely, but the client continues to work in person to be available to those who aren’t tech savvy and/or prefer to ask questions and book trips in person.
Splendid Holidays does not have an online presence.
Design a website focused on providing users with context to the services offered by the travel agency, creating a seamless user experience and optimizing SEO to grow their customer base.
Taking a non-linear approach through the five stages below, user-oriented solutions are continually refined to ensure effectiveness and innovation.
Websites from three travel agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area were compared to gauge what types of information and features are being provided by competitors.
I spoke with 5 frequent travelers to understand their history (if any) with travel agencies, how they plan travel, the pain points experienced during that process and what information they’d want to see on a travel agency’s website.
To better understand what users need, I created user personas from the interview findings to highlight users’ various travel needs.
With the insights gained from developing empathy and site maps, I was able to structure the navigation flow and better understand users' mental journeys while planning travel. These findings guided the design decisions as we moved forward in creating a user-centric site that enables users to easily inquire about services and take a short quiz for destination suggestions.
The agency’s logo hasn’t changed since its establishment in 2004 and current branding lacks cohesion. The client requested a color palette mirroring that of nature with light blue as a primary color and branding that conveys trust, invitation and reliability.
Photos of destinations are an essential aspect of business in the travel industry and low-fidelity wireframes were sketched out with that in mind, balancing out information and context to address users’ lack of understanding of the travel agency’s services.
Adjustments were made in progressing the wireframes to higher fidelity, to ensure that information-dense sections are presented in an easily comprehensible way by strengthening visual hierarchy.
Usability testing was then conducted on Maze with 5 users to assess whether sufficient information regarding the agency’s services is provided to convert customers. Users were instructed to browse the site and complete the following task:
Overall, users enjoyed the look and feel of the site and the information shown is enough to entice users to become customers. The destination quiz feature was appreciated for its simplicity and conversational tone.
Users had suggestions on being able to access the destination quiz from more than just the hero section as well as adding more in-depth details on screens that haven’t been built out due to time constraints.
