Adventures Unlimited / UX Research & UX Design
Design Objective
Create an engaging booking experience for the Adventures Unlimited Ocoee River Rafting Vacations.
Research
I started looking into vacation booking experiences online, and quickly found that the act of booking was very disconnected from the context of location, adventure and storytelling. After booking a kayaking, rafting or climbing trip it seemed that lodging accommodations were not included in the users options in booking. Either lodging was not offered in the same package or there was no choice to be made.
"I had no idea where we would be sleeping, unpacking after a long day of adventure is still part of the experience."
"I was shocked after we had arrived and I thought to myself, I have no idea what the sleeping quarters is actually like."
The first thing a family or group of friends sees when going on one of these getaways is where they will be unpacking and sleeping. I felt like this was an important touchpoint going overlooked.
The adventures themselves needed to tell a story with plenty of context. In the sites I had visited there were plenty of good descriptions of the locations, but often times the photo galleries would take you right out of the story. I could not determine where each photo was taken along the route.
Personas
The booking experience will be targeted towards:
Small Groups of 3-5 friends (ages 18-35)
Families 2 Adults (ages 35-50) 1-3 Kids (ages 5-16)
Since they have arrived on the Adventures Unlimited site, they know 1. Where they are going (Tennessee), 2. Have an idea of what they want to do for activities (Ocoee River rafting or camping).
Questions they would like addressed:
What is the appropriate adventure for me (and my family/ my friends)?
Where will we be staying?
What dates is this available?
What kind of experiences have others had?
Sketching
Wireframing
Key takeaways from the ideation phase.
Top down view of all adventure offerings one the first screen.
Create an immersive storytelling experience that sells the adventure.
Give context to the story through location based images.
Create a sense of transparency and empathy via social media reviews.
Make the booking experience simple without taking the user out of context.
Make sure to highlight lodging options, and make the experience painless but transparent.
After some intial quick sketching, I found the story that I wanted to tell. The story would be created by the users , now becoming "Adventurers". I felt like it was important to give the user a sense of context throughout the exploration & booking processes.
Final Deliverable
This concept is modular, and keeps the user in context while organizing all the powerful booking tools in one location.
I delivered two medium fidelity concepts to Morris Creative Group where they would handoff this project to their Interaction Designers to begin creating interactive prototypes. They would pick up A/B testing after completion.
