time travel tourism booking site
UX UI case study
My Role
UX UI Research & Design
Approach
Research & Analysis
Information Architecture
Brand & Visual Design
Interaction Design
Usability Testing
UI Design
Prototyping
Context
Imagine traveling through time.
After years of testing, Zeit is the world’s first time travel tourism enterprise. Allowing people to experience the most historic moments in history. With almost 300 destinations from the beginning of time to today, Zeit is in need of an e-commerce site for guests to find and book trips.
Problem
Designing for something that doesn’t yet exist.
How might we design a site to allow travelers the opportunity to travel back & relive the past. The biggest challenge with this project was tackling the concept of time travel, since it currently doesn’t exist and there is no research specifically about peoples experiences with that.

The assumption was made that time travel is very expensive & most users will be new to it.

Thus, when conducting research, I really needed to understand what they love about their current travel platforms & what will make them more likely to use zeit in the future.
Ensuring safety & reliability while having unforgettable experiences would help people book with zeit.
Research &
Goals
The possibility of higher risks also needed proportionally high value for money and time.
Extensive research conducted to understand peoples travel motivations & planning processes. Utilized this information to extract goals, wants and needs of users... as well as a deeper understanding of pain points.
1. Persona 2. Empathy Map 3. User Interviews 4. Goals
User Interviews + Goals
The goals for designing this site:
1. Get people booking travel with Zeit
2. Ensuring safety & reliability
3. Unforgettable & amazing experiences.
Research showed that people valued valuable experiences when travel planning.
Understand the users
Everyone wanted low effort planning with incredible experiences.
Whether traveling for work or pleasure, whether someone likes to plan or not... booking a trip should be a pleasant and non-stressful experience. Also, travel is expensive, time travel even more so - for someone to consider booking there would need to be a good value proposition to make it feel worth it and justified. 
1. Persona 2. Empathy Map 3. User Interviews 4. Goals
Persona + Empathy Map
User feedback informed the way the site was categorized, and what needed to be included when selecting a travel destination.
Information Architecture & Interaction Design
Card sorting & competitive analysis findings informed the feature roadmap & priority matrix.
Card Sorting + Dendrogram + Similarity Matrix + Competitive analysis + Features
Overall based on the results, eras/ time periods are a main grouping factor, as with locations. Another aspect is the separation between tech, innovation and construction/ architecture. These could also be considered as further categories when planning the site.
Site map & flows helped visualize and construct the low & mid-fidelity wireframes.
Low-Fi
Brainstormed options with user needs in mind.
Experimented creating unique designs with carousels, having various spacing - but went back to the usability above all else. Designed to be clean & eye-catching due to the vivid imagery that would come with the destination cards. I created low-fi designs that would allow the destinations to be in focus; adding the most clear value to the users.
Elaborated on one of the landing page sketches.
Mid-Fi
Utilized layout grids to create responsive wireframes
The first step to the mid-fi wireframes was creating a 12 point grid with margins to inform all the content. This also made it more seamless when designing for the mobile & tablet breakpoints.
Made multiple comments throughout the wireframes, describing and indicating the important things to note - keeping developers, product managers & other stakeholders in mind.
Logo
Incorporated the "Z" with an hourglass & a timeline with the tittle.
Futuristic & nostalgic styling as a nod to technology taking us to the past.
UI Design Elements
UI created to reflect the juxtaposition of history with modernism.
Ensuring that the colours, fonts, image treatments & UI elements would give the user the "old timey" feel without being dated. Ultimately personifying the concept of time travel through the design.
Kept this in mind while creating the overall style guide & UI kit for the site.
When travelling, people value the opinions of others.
Usability Testing
Tasked 4 participants with booking a trip to Pompeii at the time of the Vesuvius eruption to test the flow & usability of the site.
A number of comments & points were made during the testing. I mapped these using a prioritization matrix to determine the most important improvements that needed to be addressed first.
Prioritized pain points by value & low effort.
Iterated on areas of "pain" or frustration.
I improved on a number of things while watching the users complete the flow, but also focused in on the pain points they highlighted; in order of priority. Some items that were low impact & high effort, were categorized as "future" or "nice to haves" that would be saved for upcoming iterations of the site.
Final Feature
Final Feature
Prototype