Solo UX Designer for a personal project. End-to-end creation of an MVP. Includes research, information architecture, interaction Design , UI design, and iterative prototyping.
January 2021 - March 2021 (240 hours)
Zeit is offering a revolutionary product not seen anywhere. To begin researching how to approach the problem, I compared several similar brands.
I identified several aspects that worked well for each of these brands, which aided in thinking about what sort of brand Zeit would be. Since time travel is on the forefront of technology, it is especially important to engage users in a way that would address all their motivations and hesitations. Researching these brands also aided in developing proto-personas.
With these proto-personas in mind, I created a target demographic for research participants to recruit in user interviews.
The 4 participants that were selected through a pre-survey shared these characteristics:
Through remote online session semi-structured interviews with these participants, I addressed the following.
Next, I created a user persona, Sarah Longhorn, to summarize these findings. This persona served as an important reminder of how Zeit’s users may be using the website. The emphasis on safety, itinerary flexibility, and ability to create your own trip led my designs.
After creating a sitemap that followed similar travel websites, where search was the most prominent feature, I designed the main task flow from landing on the homepage to checking out a trip itinerary. With the user persona in mind, I also created user flow and task flow scenarios to better imagine how a user would navigate the sitemap. As time travel tourism was a completely new idea, it would be important to succinctly and clearly address all the user needs and motivations on the homepage to get them more invested into the offerings.
After sketching through several ideas of what the responsive may look like, I went with a format that seemed to address the user needs. I then created lo-fi wireframes in Figma.
With the lo-fi wireframes now created, the next step was to focus on branding the website into a prototype. I iterated on different versions of a logo, and created a UI Kit to best represent Zeit's feelings of sleek, historical, yet technologically focused product. I used my UI kit to create a hi-fi prototype for usability testing.
To validate my designs, I linked up my interactions in Figma to create a prototype for 3 different task flows. After debriefing 4 interviews from participants through moderated remote online sessions, I compiled all of my notes into an affinity map. Looking through the highest frequency of issues under a category and shared by the majority of participants, I prioritized which features were the most important to address in the next iteration of Zeit.
I added sections to the homepage, trip pages dedicated to highlighting Zeit’s safety features.
I added a hover state to the trip cards which expand the element outward to reveal a description of the trip and associated tags.
Tags were also added to the trip page, and used as a filter for refining search results.
Images were added to the side cart summary to make selecting a room and package more clear.
The package card was redesigned to signify that itinerary information would be revealed upon click.
FAQ copy was updated answer all questions users have about the trip process and time travel safety.
Images were added to the side cart summary to make selecting a room and package more clear.
The package card was redesigned to signify that itinerary information would be revealed upon click.
FAQ copy was updated answer all questions users have about the trip process and time travel safety.
With my high priority revisions pulled from my affinity map, I iterated on my lo-fi prototype by creating my hi-fi prototype.
Now that I have a revised prototype, the next steps would be to validate the changes through further usability testing. Usability testing really is the key in determining whether a product is going to do well when its new iteration launches. If the feedback is overall positive, then I believe Zeit’s MVP would be ready for development.
Once it has been launched, it would be important to monitor how many new bookings we have, as well as the type of questions that are asked to our support team. These questions will give a better sense of obstacles that users face as they consider booking a trip with Zeit.
