Sahtu: Indigenous Tours — A UX Case Study
About Our Client
Sahtu Adventures is a 100% owned Indigenous tour provider based in the Sahtu area of the North West Territories. James our client, runs the company alongside his wife Jennie. Having grown up in the region, their company‘s ethos merges their heritage with adventure tours. They provide cultural adventure tours — which include hiking, boating and fishing while learning about the indigenous culture and traditions, through storytelling with elders and more.
The Opportunity — with this project my team and I had the opportunity to create a responsive website, that spoke to what the region had to offer and built trust with visitors so they will be interested in the region to book a trip. Our client’s current website has a considerable amount of traffic, however, those numbers do not lead to many bookings.
During our initial meeting with James, we learned that he has preset and customizable packages, but it's not possible for potential customers to book online, the website just provides a price and a break down of the package, but booking has to be done through email or phone calls.
To gauge how Sahtu compares to its competitors and delve deeper into possible frictions that are preventing more bookings, we conducted a heuristic analysis of their current site, based on several criteria, including:
Visibility of system status
We found that headers at the beginning of each page did inform the user what page they are on and the navigation bar indicates what page the user is on — however, it is not obvious and requires more visibility.
Aesthetic and minimalist design
The site has a dark gray color scheme with little variation with a hierarchy that isinconsistent. Most call to actions, section headers, and copy have no obvious distinction. Additionally, there is a large amount of copy resulting in page boating.
User control and freedom
User can choose to leave whatever page by selecting a new one in the navigation bar.
Start with Empathy
It is very important to understand the needs and wants of potential cultural tourists. We started our research phase by conducting an online survey and several in-person interviews. From this research, we deduced several things.
Survey and Interview feedback
We synthesized the data from the survey and found patterns and themes that informed us of a better understanding of what was important to potential customers.
Our online survey received 305 responses and we conducted 3 in-person interviews.
General Travel Habits
Travel Tours
Adventure Tours — These are the factors that respondents considered to determine the quality of the tour they participated in. The majority of respondents considered the number of places visited during the tour and the duration of the tour as important.
Online booking frustrations — the majority of respondents found lack of preferred payment options, lack of itinerary, and a bad interface as a barrier to booking adventure tours online
The information gathered from our survey helped us create user personas, user stories and scenarios.
Personas
We created user personas to help identify and address the core needs and motivations of potential customers.
Primary persona — Claire
“As the main planner for our family trip, I want to be able to see all the information about custom tours online and detailed itinerary for the pre-set tours.”
Our primary persona Claire represents a user that is time conscious, but wants to find the right package — this means customizability is an important factor when choosing a tour. One of her frustrations is the lack of payment options, she prefers to pay for the tour online. She also travels in a large group and needs the flexibility to choose activities that everyone can enjoy. She is equally concerned with the authenticity of the tour and prefers to discover and experience the local culture and traditions of the places she visits.
Second Primary Persona — Maxwell
“As a busy person, I want to complete my booking online, selecting the package I want, so that I know immediately that the booking is complete.”
Our second primary persona is Maxwell, he travels with a partner, and enjoys spending time in nature and is curious to learn about different cultures. He prefers to book preset packages to avoid going over budget.
Secondary Persona — Kara
“As someone who is willing to pay more for good quality, I want to find a unique experience in the midst of tourist traps.”
Kara is our secondary persona, a teacher who travels on solo trips with a larger budget for activities. She wants to experience unique tours that are not cookiecutter. She wants to meet new people and is motivated to feel connected to nature and cultures.
To design the best solutions with our time constraint of a 3-week sprint, we decided to focus on our two primary personas, Claire and Maxwell.
Get sakin egal’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Where is the opportunity?
From Claire and Maxwell’s journey maps, we wanted to identify key opportunities that would lend to features that would satisfy the wants and needs of our users.
We needed to address the following in our design:
- Highlight James as a local, to showcase the authenticity of the experience.
- Spotlight most popular tours (packages) and activities.
- Provide a quote for custom tours and the option to select add ons.
- The ability to fulling book the tour through the website.
After gaining a solid understanding of the needs of our users we created a feature prioritization chart. We used the chart to organize the impact of features that would address our user's wants and frustrations.
Major features with a high impact were:
- An online booking flow
- Custom add-ons
- Payment integration
- Filtering by categories
How would our users interact with the site?
To start we created a design map, The design map helped us determine the hierarchical view of our website. Which ended up consisting of — Home, Packages, Custom Adventure, Services & Rentals, Our Story and Contact Us pages.
Before moving into sketches, we first also had to consider how our users would navigate the website. We created user flows, which are a visual representation of the paths users can navigate through the pages of the website. This is crucial in making sure our design addresses the user's needs.
The above is a snippet of Claire and Maxwell’s user flow respectively. Claire’s user flow shows the path to create a customized adventure, while Maxwell’s highlights the path to book a preset package.
Pen to Paper
To start this process my team and I first split up and considered solutions to the frustrations of our primary personas alone by sketching out our thoughts and interpretations on paper. After we discussed as a team, each of our solutions and began a final sketch of the design we would move forward with. We made sure we were addressing the pain points of our personas with each feature we considered.
From Sketches to Figma
After finalizing the direction of our designs we began our mid-fidelity wireframes on Figma. We each took ownership of a page to start, I began with the individual packages page. Our persona Maxwell wants to find a preset package that fits his needs. He would reach this page either through the navbar by selecting Packages, and scrolling through the packages that are on offer. This page was content-heavy, however, I had to ensure relevant information for the tour was provided without bloating it with information overload.
Testing our Design
Having made our design, it was time to put it to the test. Testing is an important part of the design process, as it allows us to assess whether our designs are understood as intended by real-life users. We presented users with a prototype of our mid-fi design and asked for feedback. Our goal was to assess if the intention of the business was clear to users, especially it being an indigenous tour provider. We also wanted to learn if users could find and book packages and services & rentals. Overall users were able to easily navigate the website and identify that it’s an indigenous run adventure tour company, they were able to select a package, and were informed of the offering of the package. However, testing our designs also resulted in several updates to our designs.
Users found the mobile layout of Custom Adventures as tedious to continuously scroll down while building the custom package. We changed it to a staged design with separate pages, this helped make the steps clearer and flow easier to understand.
After testing, we also adjusted the appearance of the calendar to make unavailable dates clearer and obvious to the user. An error state makes it clear that the dates selected are unavailable and that the action was unsuccessful, also dates that are unavailable are greyed out, to make it obvious to the user those dates can not be used.
During testing, we also learned that users found it confusing why they were being asked to purchase add-ons through the booking flow after selecting a package. We removed add-ons from the booking flow. Add-ons such as a boat trip extended the trip, thus complicating the dates users had already selected as their tour dates. To simplify the process, Equipment and Services and Rental became separate from booking a tour. This process streamlined the booking flow and make it clearer to the user.
A New Look for Sahtu Adventures
Our UI teammates created a calming yet energetic, and engaging colour scheme that conveyed a sense of trust. Their initial mood board was slightly dark, therefore they increased the opacity for brightness and a bit of freshness.
Future Considerations
James wanted us to highlight the indigenous aspect of the tours, although we achieved this from the homepage through the motto “a truly northern indigenous experience”, and throughout the site, by spotlighting activities such as traditional harvesting and storytelling. We did not have the time to showcase more information through a blog to not only increase the discoverability of the site through SEO but also address skepticism on the authenticity of the tour, a concern we heard from our respondents.
Conclusion
This project taught me a lot about working as a team to problem solve and come up with solutions. It was also a great note to end my course working with a client who was passionate and deeply invested in his business, which inspired us to convey that passion through our designs.
Thank you for reading and try out the full prototype for desktop and mobile on Figma.
