WishPoints: Building a Responsive Travel Content Website
“Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.”
Design Challenge
WishPoints is a social platform that lets users create/share travel experiences and wishlists. The CEO, Grace Lee, came to our design team with her vision for a companion website to her mobile app. We were tasked with building a website where users could post their own travel experiences or discover inspiration for their next adventure.
Involvement
I collaborated with 2 designers (Ryan Hale & Ian VanNest) on this project for the span of 2 weeks in a highly agile process. Together we created a responsive website to centralize the WishPoints experience so that users could find trusted travel content. I took the lead on the experience design.
Research
Data Gathered from Screener Survey
To tackle our design challenge, we set out to understand more about our users. Specifically, how do frequent travelers tend to share their experiences and how do would-be travelers gather travel information to prepare for an upcoming trip.
To ensure that we would be gathering data from our target users, we sent out a screener survey, which allowed us to gain further qualitative data with only frequent or would-be travelers.
Frequent Travelers
- 90% of interviewed users genuinely enjoy sharing their travel experiences and advice.
- 80% feel they don't have the time to sit down and write blogs.
- 80% of interviewed frequent travelers admitted that they take more time to create personalized suggestions for friends.
"I am willing to go the extra mile for friends, making itineraries and lists as suggestions." - Cheryl B.
Would-Be Travelers
- For suggestions, would-be travelers turn to both on/offline sources.
- The most trusted offline source for travel information were friends who had visited the location before (90.9% of 44 survey takers).
- 90% of would-be travelers mentioned they prefer true cultural experiences over touristy ones.
"When I travel, I crave authentic experiences." - Rebecca R.
One major business goal WishPoints had was to increase the amount of posted travel content from travel experts. Therefore, we made the decision to focus on users that frequently travel and share their experiences like Brian, The Backpacker.
Design
Sections highlighted in blue have been built in the MVP design.
Architecture
Research revealed that frequent travelers usually give travel advice to friends in the form of lists and itineraries. Therefore, we included these as ways to upload content to WishPoints. For our MVP, we focused on the ability for users to create new best-of lists as well as discover new content.
Publishing a New Best-Of List
Through rapid prototyping in our initial design stages, we reduced the steps in our user flow by 40%, creating a more streamlined experience. We achieved this by incorporating time saving functions like making use of uploaded photos' metadata and allowing category selection to be set for the whole list.
The final version of our user flow was reduced to 9 steps.
Iterating to Make Content Sharing: Intuitive & Less Time Consuming
Before
First rounds of iterating only had sample text within the adding an experience template.
After
To further guide the user and make the process intuitive, short descriptions were provided in addition to the sample text.
Before
Initially, category selection was completed by having the user choose a category individually for every experience within the list.
After
To reduce repetitive actions and save users time, we included category selection within overall list details. This auto-populates all experiences within the list to have the same category.
Keeping in Mind Microinteractions
Post Action Box is persistent and scrolls with the user.
Clicking the Add Another Experience Button expands the button into a new empty experience template.
The style of our website was heavily influenced by the current, existing mobile app. We aimed to create a cohesive WishPoints experience that allows for scalability.
It was exciting working with the team under the 2 week time constraint. Performing under an agile process, we were able to deliver a beautiful and scalable MVP that addressed the client's mission and goals.
The client interactions held with WishPoints were great in illuminating business priorities and what to keep in mind to measure our website's success. As a client, Grace was a pleasure to work with and was readily available for feedback.
Working with Ryan and Ian was also an absolute blast and we soon discovered our different strengths and how to play to them. Our team dynamic taught me new perspectives in approaching design and problem solving, which was a huge growing experience for me as a designer.