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Zeit, a subsidiary of Virgin Enterprises, is bringing the travel industry into the future. With time travel recently being ruled as safe for the general public, Zeit needs to launch an e-commerce site for their customers to book and manage their time travel trips.
Create a booking platform that is responsive, easy to navigate, and transparent about the novel technology employed by Zeit. This will allow Zeit to create a client base, maintain customer trust, and generate business through the sale of travel packages.
This project was completed as a speculative project for DesignLab.
Product Designer
Pen and Paper, Figma, Optimal Sort, Whimsical, Marvel
Market Research
Persona
Empathy Map
Project Goals
Site Map
User flow
Wireframes
Logo Design
UI Kit
Hi-Fi Prototype
Usability Testing
Affinity Map
Project Takeaways
As time travel is a new industry, no direct competitors currently exist. However, business offering travel experiences in the present era could be analyzed to determine best practices for designing a time travel experience. Through market analysis, the following was determined:
• Customers value websites/apps with clean UI, easy booking of experiences and accommodations in one platform, and customer reviews/testimonials
• Safety warnings, while only featuring in one of the competitor sites, would be highly valuable for travel to different time periods.
• A strong filter system, with the option to filter by different price points, would make Zeit accessible for users of different income brackets.
I interviewed 9 participants between the ages of 23-28 to better understand the way that people plan trips, including what online resources they currently use for researching destinations, accommodations, and activities. I wanted to know their current frustrations and pain points, as I could then design Zeit around those pain points.
• Motivations for travel were primarily sightseeing and activities. For time travel specifically, users are motivated by personal interest and overall curiosity about past cultures and events.
• Users cited cost as being a significant factor in what they will or will not book. They need easy-to-navigate booking sites/apps with good filtration and easily accessible reviews. For time travel specifically, users need to know how safe/ethical a trip will be.
• Users cited false advertisements, limited freedom on group trips, too many options (limited filtration), and difficult in comparing prices across sites as pain points in their travel planning experiences. For time travel specifically, users states they won’t go out of their way to seek the experience.
Janine Davis represents the Zeit user who is motivated to travel for fun, authentic experiences- and wants to ensure she's getting a good deal out of it. Based on the persona and empathy map, Zeit needs to be a trustworthy booking platform. Features such as reviews, cancellation/refund policy, safety information, and cost transparency are all important to have.
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With time travel being new, no competitor businesses had comparable methods of organizing their travel offerings, Using OptimalSort, I completed an open-card-sorting activity with 5 participants to group different travel destinations. A general trend of grouping by time period, location, and type of history (henceforth referred to as ‘interest’) was found. The latter felt analogous to the ‘experience’ category on many competitor travel sites. I decided that these three categories would be the basis of sorting trips on Zeit. Navigation for the site was designed around the three main categories of filtration, along with pages that would further convince the users of the trustworthiness of Zeit (FAQ, safety, etc). As Zeit is a global enterprise, language and currency can be set to the user's specifications.
While users can take many paths through Zeit, I chose to focus on the booking/checkout task flow specifically. The ability to search for certain destinations was key to this flow, which otherwise followed the flow of a normal e-commerce experience.
The persona of Janine helped to develop the plain task flow into a more detailed user flow. Navigation to different pages shows different paths users may take to educate themselves on the product before continuing to the main checkout flow.
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Based on all of the above, I designed a user interface which took my users’ motivations, needs, and pain points into consideration. I aimed to design an easy-to-navigate site- this included using a fat footer and drop-down menus for navigation, having clear photos of trips, and having a filtration system. As the website needed to be accessible across many device types, I kept the design modular, for responsiveness.
Please click images for full details.
The UI requirements document can be viewed here.
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Zeit’s UI rebrand focused on its identity as a time travel agency. The logo and overall feel of the site were designed on a retro/vintage design scheme- as Zeit’s time travel packages only focus on destinations in the past, a design based in futuristic elements did not make sense.
The choice of colors for Zeit was inspired by weathered parchment and the graphical design of the 70s- using pops of color against an otherwise plain background. A sans serif font, Montserrat, was chosen both for its clean read, as well as the vintage feel it gives to the copy of the site. The site was designed with minimalism in mind.
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The following was revealed through the usability study:
• Users liked: the overall layout, the navigation system, the flow of the website
• Pain Points: the limits on navigation from trip results to trip details page (wanted to click on image/title text instead of on button), size/ability to find favorite button
• Other noticings: users liked the ‘booking details’ card in checkout screens, found the filter system easy to understand.
Overall, testing was successful. Issues arose in UI elements, but the overall pathways were obvious, and easy to understand.
This project was completed as part of DesignLab’s UX Academy. While Zeit is a fictional company, the work found within is not.
As my first full project, working on Zeit taught me a lot in a very short amount of time. I gained experience in researching best practices, selecting solutions based on user needs, and designing and iterating based on user feedback. Though all pages were not designed, the overall flow and visual layout was positively received by users. This was due in part to using existing e-commerce design patterns- I learned that there is no sense in recreating the wheel when designing for user experience. If it works- use it!
My next steps with this project would be to iterate further on the UI, especially for the booking section (calendar selection for travel dates instead of a drop-down), and run many more rounds of usability testing to further iterate upon the design. I would also experiment with a chatbot or other automated help service.
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