Introducing Aloha Travels, a travel company based in the USA that provides exciting tours to remote locations with tour guides to make your travel adventure memorable.
This project was assigned in March 2020. It was a solo led project comprised of starting the project from scratch with ideation, research, design, and development. I collaborated with all available stakeholders over the time period on the execution and delivery of the final product v1.
Create an online platform that will allow users to book a tour for travel purposes and with any budget. In addition, to create a full tour, add multiple starting dates for the same tour. display map of the locations.
The customer should be able to explore all tours, write reviews about their travel, and book tours. The platform should be able to accept payments through Stripe.
Platforms: a cross-browser responsive website with back-end
Build a complete user experience that makes it easy for travel enthusiasts to book tours online. Increase customer market and maximize sales revenue once covid-19 element settles down. Minimize the call bookings and bring customers online.
Sell more than 500 packages per month with our new online platform.
Partner with a bus company for the travel.Partner with tent-renting companies for the camping trips to ease travel.
Aloha Travels wants to increase its sales. They want an online platform for the existing and new customers to be able to view and book tours online and reduce office visits to a minimum due to pandemic. The company wants to pivot to offer new travel experiences in remote locations instead of city tours.
Human-centered design is very important to connect user goals with business goals. It indeed plays a vital role to create user empathy, their need, and evaluate flexibilities when they use the platform. The website should be designed in line with the human perspective and psychological behavior. To create a feel for the user to stay on the site and maximize the transaction rate.
The first thing after defining problems was to perform competitor analysis of other directly and indirectly associated travel companies’ websites to gather data, possible improvements, and feature overlap.
The main target was to find common features, existing solutions, weaknesses, and unique values.
The word travel is quite vast as it a lot of things associated with it. It has several domains. Not everyone is looking for adventure. Different range of travelers faces different problems. After stakeholder meeting online and defining product and business goals. it was crucial to have an initial mind map of possible traveler needs. I divided the map into pre-travel, in-travel, and post-travel sections to understand user behavior.
It is a very important step in the research phase which helps define the USP of the project, clear misconceptions, and wrong assumptions.
To understand real problems and pain points, we started with user interviews. There was a total of 10 participants.
This step helps find a correlation between theory and fact.
An empathy map helps in organizing the feelings and thoughts of the users. It is very productive in finding the best solution.
This step consists of synthesizing all the above-mentioned data into a single set of solutions.
Validated Personas
Design and develop the complete front and backend tour booking platform that provides a comfortable experience to view a tour and book it online. It must be able to provide clear steps in booking, proper error handling, and a comfortable checkout process.
Working on any project alone does have a lot of external pressure and internal emotions to do justice to the work. I tried my best not to corrupt the project with my personal opinion, not to reinvent the wheel and focus more on data rather than emotion.
I can’t deny the fact that there are hundreds of competitors out there who are also actively working on improving their product.
The main pressure that I felt was the implementation, choosing the stack, dividing the design into components, Code Structure, Data Modelling, jwtToken, Stripe, and email setup besides planning out the API in the middle of the development stage. I found a free design for the front-end which I curated to my requirements and build the rest on top of it and learn about solutions for the problems that I faced through youtube tutorials, stack overflow, and Udemy course especially Jonas’s Node.js course. I will happily admit that there were moments that this weight got the best of me and at times I did feel like going through imposter syndrome.
This project has allowed challenging my mental strength allowing me to create a fine balance between resolve when a complex problem occurs, not panicking in failure, and be content with the output when complies with input (when going through iterations).
Finally, I would like to that I have really enjoyed the project. While I feel that there is still room for improvement, I am happy with the result. I will take all the lessons learned in this project to the next one.
You can visit the below for a detailed journey in design and development respectively.
Feedback will motivate me to share more of my work. Let me know what you think in the comment section below.