• Overall, the brand logo and branding have been created and applied in the designs. The responsive e-commerce website has been ideated, wireframed, designed, and finally tested and iterated to be able to deliver to implement and gradually fulfill project goals.
• Explored the project possibilities, core information, and user pain points under project constraints.
• Listed project assumptions, and conduct researches to prove the assumption. Some assumptions are proven right and some are proven wrong. Discovered important user expectations for further designs.

Research

To be able to understand the customers and how they will use this product, the first step would be to emphasize with them and collect the key information about user expectations and pain points. So I set up the three Research Goals are the things that I want to learn, and conducted Market Research, Competitor Research, and User Interview.

Here are the main 3 research goals:

After conducting Competitor Research, Market Research and User Interview, I realized the target demographics generally have a positive attitude toward Time-Travel, especially those who considered themselves as "adventurous". The top 3 concerns when booking a time-travel trip are: safety, price, and activities. When comes to the product, tere are 6 main user needs:

Generally speaking, our users are looking for conveniency, flexibility, and new experiences when booking a trip.

Who are our users?

Based on the research results, I synthesized the data and portraited a user persona to better describe our users.

What should be in the product?

I created the Feature Road Map based on what I have learned from the user interview and the competitor research.

Decided on the "Must-Haves" which are the key features that should be included in the product in order to create a basic experiences. "Nice-to-haves" and "Surprise-and-delightfuls" which are considered as the second priority but still necessary to be able to create a satisfying experiences. "Can-come-later" for features that are considered still impactful and valuable to some extent, but might cost some time to develop.

Designs

Here are the two questions that I wanted to anwser while thinking about the design for the users: how the users will be using the website and how do they accomplish their tasks? So I started to imagine and design the flow and process of my persona arriving at the site, browsing the travel packages, searching for the destination that they want, looking for information, and finally booking a trip.

Here are the User Flow and Task Flow that I created to visualize this process.

New travelers and Returned travelers

Time-Travel, as a new and innovative industry, there will be a large percent of our website visitors who are the first-time travelers, or even just curious about the trip and technology. So when designing the User Flow, I considered both travelers who are the first time visit the site or the return customers.

How does users accomplish their goals?

In order to better understand how users accomplish their task on our site: looking for the trip and then booking the trip, I designed the user Task Flow based on the behaviours and decisions of my persona "Nicole" first time visiting the site and searching and booking her trip on the website.

Based on the information architecture, the users will most likely categorize the destinations by "Time Period", "Location", and "Events". Before making the final decision, the research result has shown that most customers will likely ask questions/look up reviews/get online help to reduce their concerns about safety, pricing, and acitivies.

Wireframes & Prototype

After figuring out the user flows, I referenced the existing competitor products and start to sketch the wireframes for the website with the understanding of user needs, expectations, motivations, and pain points.

Sketches

I made three scketches for the Landing Page based on the User Flow and Information Architecture. There should be the search bar that allows users to search for the specific trips, popular/featured trip suggestions, a introduction abou "Time-Travel", and potentially a user review section.

Prototype for testing

From the sketches, I started to digitalize the low fidelity designs into wireframes using the tool Figma.

With wireframe, I wanted to make clear the arrangement of the contents, as well as a site structure that allows users to successfully accomplish their goals. Due to the time constrain, I wireframed 6 pages including the landing page, about page, search page, trip information page and two responsive landing pages for tablets and phones, aiming to test out the User Flow and Task Flow listed above.

After having a wireframe that deliver the visual hierachy and information architecture, I then turn them into a mid-fidelity prototype with logo design, branding design, and UI design.

The overall branding style is aiming to deliver the message of modern & fresh, classcial & historical, technology. The logo design is trying to create a sense of trip, fast, and edgy.

Testing

I conducted usability testing using the desktop version mid-fidelity prototype. Users were given specific scenarios and tasks to complete. The test is aim to know whether users can successfully process the information on the website, is there anything provent them from completing the tasks, and what could be improved for the overall experience.

After synthsized my note and observations, I put together an Affinity Map and identified priority revisions based on the impact and cost.

Based on the insights from the affinity map and priority revision, I made several changes to the prototype:

• Make changes to the visual designs, such as available date, filter bar, etc. to make the important information more accessible to read, clear and straight-forward for understanding.
• Change the wording to prevent confusing about website sections' functionalities.
• Re-designed or reduced the functions that were claimed "not useful" or "not intuitive enough to use", such as "search whole site" and "share/save trip". So that the design concept is easier to grasp and also more intuitive to be applied in the practical user environment.

After the project

What I learned

The research part in this project is tricky since it is under a fictional context, and there is no direct competitors or testers with prior experiences that I can refer to or recruit. During the research process, I have to keep asking myself, what is the core information that I want to find, how to ask questions that users can also refer to their ordinary travels, or how to search for indirect competitors but think further about Time-Travel services. The toolset and thinking process that I learned from this project help me to better work in an highly innovative environment.

What I'll do differently

• Spend more time on organizing the information, conduct more activities like Card Sorting to create more categories, tags, filter keywords, help users to search for their target trip easier and faster.
• Talk to stakeholders and industry experts to gain more insights about the products, create more user-friendly and helful introductories and trip contents for new users.
• Create user flows for different tasks (problem solving before booking, cancel/modify trip, etc.) with customer journey maps, and elaborate on or make changes to the original design to allow a great and smooth user experience on these tasks.

Thanks for the reading!