Paradise Motorcycle Tours

Paradise Motorcycle Tours is a prototype itinerary app that I designed with the aim of making the process of planning and booking a motorcycle tour more user friendly. The project began with some initial research analysing competitors, conducting interviews and sending out surveys.

Later, I utilised the research using the the key insights to obtain a core problem before designing the app. This involved wire framing, low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes being created and refined with the project being completed over 8 weeks.

What Did I Do?
Project Research, Product Design, UI Design, Branding, Prototyping.

Challenge
Organising a motorcycle tour itinerary poses various challenges and can consume a lot of unnecessary time and energy. Research revealed that a large proportion of motorcycle tours are undertaken as a group. However, booking as a group proved difficult.

In addition to this, reviewing the location of different accommodation was a challenge due to accommodation options being spread across various platforms. Whilst customers do have the option to book pre-organised tours, these are often inflexible.

Insight – Conversation / Feedback
I held conversations with seven people and asked a number of general questions to aid my research. The following statements which I feel are relevant are taken from said conversations.

User Study
A survey was sent to people to get their feedback on motorcycle tours and how easy they found the process of booking and planning the tour. The questions in this survey were designed to assess how difficult users found booking a tour, in addition to elaborating on the frequent pain points that were previously discussed in the interviews.

Competitor Analysis
Following the User Survey and feedback, I then decided to conduct some competitor analysis on some popular motorcycle tour companies online. I did this to look at the functionality they offer platforms see how that tied in with our feedback.

Observations

• Poor functionality – Many of the websites and applications that were researched lacked the ability to search and filter tours. If a person wanted to create their own or select a fixed tour, the functionality that was lacking made this difficult. I identified this as a focus.
• A lack of information – In addition to low functionality, the fixed tour splash pages on many sites lacked information. Of the competitors researched, Redee seemed to offer the best user experience from finding a tour to providing the user with the end information.
• No mobile specific apps – A general search on the Apple App Store and competitor analysis revealed that there is no app specifically for booking a motorcycle tour.

Key Insights

• Time consuming and difficult to manage – Creating an itinerary is quite time consuming, even if the end user is confident in creating itineraries for their motorcycle tours. Therefore, if the user doesn’t enjoy spending a lot of time doing this, it is not practical.
• Fragmented planning – Booking a tour is difficult if you have to use different platforms to accomplish the trip you were planning, especially if you need to have a clear understanding of what days you will be arriving or if you need to contact the owners of the accommodation. Usually people have to book venues separately on individual websites which provide different user experiences.
• Trust – As you have to book locations on their own platforms, it is hard for the end user to receive unbiased reviews or feedback. Confidence is crucial because consumers want to know ‘is this a safe place to travel?’.

User Flow
On completion of my research, I began to outline a user flow chart of how I would expect users to use the application and then how we aim to allow users to fulfil their goals and objectives. This helped me to identify some challenges of how the trips being planned are broken down in the itinerary section of the app.

Design Systems
After completing my sketches and low fidelity designs it became clear that I was going to have to iterate a lot on different elements such as location cards, accommodation cards and the itinerary. As a result, I decided to create a design system to help streamline the process of changing the app elements.

High Fidelity / Refinement

• Location and Accommodation Cards
  The challenge of creating two cards is that they would need to work in unison for the user to help them map out their tour for the area and where the rider would end up staying. Therefore, the cards needed to show activity data points as well as pricing and review information.

• Itinerary Section
  From sketch and low fidelity I refined the itinerary section, the main problem was that it looked quite cumbersome because it had multiple important data points that couldn’t missed off the section. Therefore, I had to create a solution that made the flow of the itinerary section simple and accessible to all of these data points.

• Filtering
  Another important element of the problem was filtering the ‘recommended’ locations based on the user requirements, skill level, seasonal weather and the number of riders arriving.

Overview
Finally, I created an interactive prototype to demonstrate how these page would work to iron out any last design challenges that had not come up in wire framing or research.

Retrospect
Due to this being a case study I would have liked to have spent more time designing the project. Some elements of the functionality could have been more thought out before it went to high fidelity such as the ‘My Account’ area of the product. On reflection, I also believe it would have been more beneficial to complete the survey before the interviews. This would have allowed me to explore the points raised in the survey further in conversation.