Zeit is an imaginary provider of time travelling adventures. They are the first to offer this game-changing service in the travel industry and their goal is to make time travelling accessible to the many. I designed their responsive e-commerce platform as part of my DesignLab UX Academy student portfolio.

The Problem

Up to now, Time Travelling has been relegated to the realm of science fiction. With Zeit the doors to the past are open and with them a brand new segment in the travel market.
How do you create excitement, trust and demand for a radically new service, which nobody has ever experienced before?
The task in this project was to design a platform that would make booking a trip back in time as exciting as purchasing a new Tesla and as easy as ordering your groceries.

Discover

I started off with a Competitive Analysis to get my head around how successful travel e-commerce portals put their offer across to customers. Of course, there are no direct competitors to Zeit yet. So I decided that studying adventure, luxury and space travel providers would yield insights relevant to Zeit’s market segment.

Where the trip catalogue is extensive, categorisation and filtering to help users find the right offer quickly is essential.
The starkest takeaway, however, was the importance of picture galleries, which help travellers imagine the experience and build excitement.
‍Client photo feeds are a great touch. They show off a community of satisfied travellers and provide credibility to the brand. 
High end providers offered high degrees of trip customisation - this is an opportunity for Zeit to serve different market segments, from budget travellers to luxury lovers.

My starting hypothesis around Personas is that travellers with a generous budget and an appetite for adventure were likely to be early adopters of the Zeit offer. I sketched five Proto-personas .

In my Interviews I aimed to test the validity of my proto-personas and get a deeper understanding of their preferences and needs. I spoke to a combination of younger adventure travellers, retired campers and families with teenage children. In my conversations I set out to discover:

• What are our target users’ motivations and preferences when it comes to travelling?
  
• What can we learn from the experiences of our target users with conventional travel booking?
• How do our target users feel about time travelling?
• How can we imagine the journey of a target user towards our service?

Here are some cross-cutting insights emerging from my interviews:

I created an 'Adventure Lover' Persona to get a more detailed picture of my early adopter target user.

I then captured her hypothetical Customer Journey with Zeit.

Define

To start defining Zeit's site structure and content I translated my research insights into key Design Principles:

• Feel it before you book it - photos, videos and testimonials should help the prospective traveler imagine the trip and feel confident that there will be no nasty surprises.
  
• High touch customer service -  most people considering embarking in a time travelling adventure are likely to have a number of questions and concerns. A responsive customer service, accessible through many different channels will not only delight customers, but also gather lots of valuable market feedback on the product. My research suggests that offering the option of an in-person chat with a ZEIT ambassador might be a convincing factor for undecided travellers.
• Keep it simple - the science and mechanics of time travelling are super complicated, but a traveller's experience must be simple. T&Cs must be clear and support always at hand to address any questions.
• Dream before you decide - the conversion time from first seeing a time travelling trip to booking it is likely to be significant. Features like saving a trip wish list, getting updates on new offers or feed updates for your favourite trips can help keep the desired trip in the user's mind until they are ready to book.
• Create an exclusive community - people who book a trip should be invited to join ZEIT's exclusive time travellers community, to get updates, be able to ask questions to other travellers before their trip or share experiences afterwards. This community can act as promoter of the ZEIT brand.

The Site Architecture reflects the focus on simplicity and an investment in generating content for a community of subscribers to be 'nurtured towards conversion':

I mapped the User Flow across the site:

My research threw up lots of ideas of features. I prioritised them in a Feature Roadmap to be clear about what to focus on in the initial design.

Design

My hypothesis, confirmed by research, is that the conversion time between first checking out the Zeit website and finally booking a trip will be longer than with a traditional trip. With this in mind, I designed with the aim to:

• generate curiosity and excitement through lots of images and videos
• evidence reputation and create trust including press quotes and client testimonials
• get subscribers by encouraging visitors to join the Zeit community for exclusive access to information and experiences
• get users to create an account and save their favourite trips
• make the trip catalogue easy to browse through an advanced filtering design, a search bar and gallery displays
• make the contact customer service function easily accessible and unobtrusive

I created wireframes and tested success against these goals before moving on to design.
The tests made it quickly clear that subscribing CTAs should be more prominent. I also decided to replace the contact section with a simple floating action button instead. This could be an expandable FAB linking to all contact options on a click.