Travefy Website Builder
As a team, we hoped to continue providing value to travel agents per our mission statement. COVID-19 presented new challenges for the travel industry, and finding ways to help agents while travel was paused proved difficult. Our user base was overwhelmingly composed of independent contractors who do not always have the extensive support networks that other travel organizations have.
Discovery
Earlier experiments with ‘Marketing Profiles’ showed that many of our users were interested in having a dedicated web page listing their experience, expertise, and samplings of trips created with our itinerary software. These functioned like virtual business cards that were easy for agents to share and post across social media.
This initial experiment was created as an MVP in order to gauge interest in new features. The goal with these MVPs was to find ways that agents could perform productive work during the lull in travel due to COVID-19.
Exploration
I began user interviews following the release of ‘Marketing Profiles’. I sought out travel agents for these exploratory conversations in order to better understand:
What business goals were satisfied with ‘Marketing Profiles’?
In what ways could your ‘Marketing Profile’ better serve your business?
What online method do you currently use in addition to ‘Marketing Profiles’?
Do you have a website?
These and other qualitative questions sought to get at the center of the value travel agents found in ‘Marketing Profiles’.
Overwhelmingly there was a positive response to 'Marketing Profiles’ but users generally felt that it did not have enough features to fully entice them to replace their websites.
We began creating an MVP for a ‘Website Builder’ next.
Implementation
Consumers have lots of choices for website builders already available to them. Striking the balance between ‘Creative Freedom’ and ‘Ease of Use’ came to be the key to creating useful features for our Website Builder. In the end, we decided to adopt a strategy of creating various themes with swappable components.
These components were building blocks that users would most likely use on a simple website. We created components that satisfied the agent’s business objectives and utilized existing app functionality. Multiple rounds of user interviews and user testing were performed to help determine the direction for these components.
Figma⇀Storybook⇀Dev Implementation⇀QA Approval