Empowering a travel company with foundational UX research — a case study

When Vanessa Fondeur, founder of Latino World Travelers (no pun intended) and I first spoke at the beginning of our 10-week partnership, she wanted personas. She wanted to know her users better as she was rebuilding her site.

I was certainly able to help. I love UX research, particularly when it comes to learning the many unique quirks among individuals in their reaction to products. I have my own, too.

Amalia is quite relevant to the current user of Latino World Travelers.

Carl could be a newer addition to Latino World Travelers as it continues to build upon its user base. Latino World Travelers welcomes people of all backgrounds to its travel community

Establishing strategy and scope 🚀

After a lengthy call together that got into the important why and how of her business, the strategy and scope, I realized I could provide her with more than a couple neat personas.

My goal, provide valuable structure 📶

Travel companies are built upon experiences. AirBnB has its own experiences division. The premise is entirely encapsulated by UX.

This was a relatively short, 10-week partnership, but all the same I wanted to leave Vanessa with some sound foundational UX principles and methods that can aid her as she scales her own TrX* business. *travel experiences

I deeply considered Latino World Traveler’s mission:

To establish Latino representation in the travel industry, and to familiarize customers of all backgrounds with foreign experiences.

Getting people to traverse outside of their cultural bubble, so to speak. Try something new. Have a unique, boutique experience as one traveler put it during a user interview.

Dream. Discover. Inspire. 🌟

The tagline for Latino World Travelers.

But, it could be so much more. As I got to know Vanessa and her users, one of my first insights was to bake the tagline into the information architecture of her website. Each word could represent a part of her products and services.

1. The dream consists of the trip experiences, whether on a group trip led by Vanessa herself, or on a private trip using Latino World Travelers as the booking platform.
2. Help users discover invaluable travel advice, consume content related to other people’s travel experiences, or interact with the community on the Facebook group, or other social media.
3. And, to inspire other Latinos to do the same by joining the World Traveler ambassador program, encouraging inclusion and community.

Community is at the heart of Latino World Travelers. I happened upon Comradery, a great webapp integration that empowers businesses to build a communities on their websites. I strongly recommended it.

I believe in empowering businesses with SaaS apps whenever possible. Some subscriptions are well with your time. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel if you can find the right spokes. Just get it moving.

The deliverables

The rest of my time spent with Latino World Travelers culminated in the following UX research deliverables that I hope will be valuable resources for the business moving forward.

Research findings

An affinity map concluding my research findings. The categories were broken down into experience, booking, expectations, activities, trip energy level, transportation, and community.

Competitor tracking

View the spreadsheet on Airtable here.

Latina World Travelers is another welcome addition to the people of color travel space.

User flows ⏬

In our strategy call, we devised the two most important red routes for her site: group trip booking and private trip booking, illuminated here.

Group trips with Latino World Travelers build bonds. Find out for yourself.

Looking for something more personal? Make a custom trip itinerary.

Information architecture 🏛

AKA sitemap.

This project only entailed the red routes during the redesign. I included the rest for reference to her so she may build out the pages within the map to help her with structural inventory.

Actionable research, testing a red route

During our strategy call, Vanessa mentioned her immense interest in building a custom-booking platform for her website. I wanted to help her visualize the idea through a clickable prototype.

It would be a basic route tested with users I previously interviewed. For now, users are able to only book trip activities through Latino World Travelers. Integrating flight and accommodation booking is for a later iteration.

Sketchwork

Initially, I thought a drag and drop calendar would be awesome. Let users select as many activities as they are interested in and then they can fit them together into possible itineraries.

Shows the progression of moving from one location to another.

The design didn’t quite hit the mark. It was workable, but not an ideal prototype. And it would be difficult to transition to mobile. Not that many users would book a trip on their phone, but some do.

But, I wanted to keep the scheduling feel as an experience. I made it similarly to any table we may create in a spreadsheet. Simple, but effective.

I like options. So I thought, why not lay out the feature as a schedule already, and display events happening in all available locations at the same time so that users can peruse, and pick and choose.

Then I got to designing. I did everything in Figma. Latino World Traveler’s lent me their color initial design for the front page, along with their color palette. For fonts, I chose Monsterrat & Nunito . Very fun and bouncy.

A few key screens from the prototype

Key user test findings

• Multiple users asked about flight and hotel accommodations
• A user wanted to know how physically strenuous an activity would be
• Users wanted to plan for just one location at a time. This would scale well to mobile as well.
• Users wanted clearer CTA’s when selecting how many guests would be attending a trip, and for selecting travel dates. At the moment users must select the number of guests, hit confirm, then select their dates and hit confirm. The current design seemed clunky to them.
• There was some confusion that occurred when users clicked a city they were interested in under ‘Places to go.’ A few users assumed the planner would open immediately for them. They wondered why all of the cities were displayed during the planning option.
• Users loved being able to share the completed itinerary with friends, and to save it to Google calendar.
• I was missing a period after one of the headlines.
• Users wanted to select the number of days they were staying in a location earlier in the route.

Going forward

• Provide flight and hotel accommodation options
• Provide a way to measure the energy level of an activity
• Provide travel times between locations
• Provide an interactive map. This just isn’t possible in a prototype.
• Make the planning feature more social, allowing users to invite people to look at and comment on the itinerary.
• Make an option to plan location by location
• Define what activities by type. Add activity categories.

I had hoped to instill a bit of the ruggedness that UX offers into Latino World Travelers so that in the future the company may continue to iterate its products and services using UX as a guiding practice.