Tours Management System

In December 2017, I took over as the lead UX Producer on the new Tours Management System which was developed by Whitespace, in collaboration with and for VisitScotland.

Key tasks

  • Personas and establishing key audiences

  • User journey mapping

  • Low fidelity prototype/wireframe

  • Facilitating workshops

  • Project and stakeholder management

  • Collaborating with developers and creatives

  • User acceptance testing (UAT)

  • Evaluating project outcomes

  • Phase 2 recommendations

Aim

Design and deliver a bespoke Tours Management System that meets the needs of tour operators, tourists (international and local) as well as VisitScotland administrators. Increase traffic and engagement to the Tours section of visitscotland.com

Background

VisitScotland’s core purpose is to help consumers holiday in Scotland. The go to channel for consumers is VisitScotland.com with the approximately 20 million visitors (visits 13 million) per annum. The two key sections to support holidaying in Scotland are holiday section and tours with current page views of holidays break 600,000 and the tours section circa 500,000.

Results

1600+ Tours managed by TMS in the first 12 months

600+ Active operators

3 Front end deliverables seamlessly integrated into visitscotland.com

Examining Existing Pain Points

  • Search function appears to return incorrect results. (The system often returns zero results when customer search)

  • Categories in the tours section are outdated, e.g. “coach tour” could be replaced by more specific categories, such as “minibus”

  • Tours search doesn’t offer enough flexibility for customers e.g. accessibility, luxury/budget, length of tour

  • Back end is not user friendly for tour operators, hence why there are less than 700 tours in the system

  • Front end does not feature inspiring visuals

  • Admin system should allow for better management of tours

Business Objectives

The tours system VisitScotland had in place provided a poor user experience and customer journey. The system (destination management system or ‘DMS’) had difficulty coping with multi-destination tours, departure points and bespoke itineraries. This has led to instances where businesses have created multiple listings with different geographical locations, to circumvent the problem.  Also the customer journey has been confused and inconsistent and of varied quality, with a number of searches returning zero results or results not meeting consumers or industries expectations. The restrictions and limitations of the system has also limited the type of content business add and the search parameters have been too narrow to be effective. Current market size SDMA estimate their members generated nearly £50 million of sales for the Scottish Tourism industry 2015. VisitScotland needs to support the travel/tours industry service this consumer demand by providing a seamless customer journey. VisitScotland need to increase the awareness of tours/packaging available, providing the right technology to facility the end to end process for customers to research, book and share the experience.  

1. Increase traffic to tours section by 10-15% within 12 months
2. Convert 15% traffic on holidays break section into consumer bookings within 24 months
3. Increase the current 673 listed tours in the DMS to over 1,200 bookable options within 12 months.

Requirements for the new solution

  • Ability to include travel offers with maximum capacities and expiration dates etc.

  • Ability to place an easy to use widget or equivalent onto VS.com which would be fully responsive

  • Potentially the same widget/solution could be used as a standalone to work on social platform, kiosks and exhibitions etc.

  • A future proof solution which will have the ability to develop as the business requirements change

  • Compatible with GA and easy to use dashboard for reporting snapshot results

  • Available in multi languages as a minimum; German, French, Spanish, Italian & Dutch

  • Must be able to cater to all types of tours

  • Should require the creation of only one business listing per provider, with multiple tours

  • Should be able to accommodate departure points outside Scotland, and multiple destinations for a single tour

  • Facility to search tours on lots of different parameters for example by themes or by dates, number of days, method of transport or by cost etc.

  • Calendar facility to post trips in the future up to 24 months

  • Should allow users to search using the criteria they need (date, departure time, departure point, etc.)

  • Should allow tour providers to encourage conversion with inspiring content

  • User friendly CMS allowing tour operators to maintain their own content

Personas

Six personas were created to make sure all factors/consumer needs were considered when thinking about service design for the future solutions.

Scenario 1 - Example

Barbara is a 45 year old teacher from Berlin, Germany who is an avid Outlander fan. She has dreamed of visiting Scotland with her family Husband Mike 45 engineer and adrenaline junkie and two boys Ben and Grant who are 12 and 10, the boys love outlander and outdoor adventure places. They plan to travel in July and have a budget of £2,000.

Barbara receives a VisitScotland e-newsletter which prompts her to go to VisitScotland.com to plan her dream holiday in Scotland heavily featuring Outlander!

User Actions

  • Researching on VS.com German site (multi language tool to aid research)

  • Find Outlander information on VisitScotland.com. (Arrive at outlander landing page)

  • Search Outlander tours/holiday packages (from Outlander page)/requirement tours/holiday widget on page

  • Barbara inserts dates, number of guests, age of guests, numbers of days of travel. Requirements returning tours available, dates and location of departure and costs.

  • Ability to book or ask questions (web chat tool? or direct line to tour/holiday company?) Requirement integration piece with tours/holiday operation to transfer the enquiry thread so the customer doesn’t have to start the process again.

  • Barbara wants to ensure the trip includes something which will tick the adrenaline box for the boys. Using the tours/holiday widget search for activity breaks.

High fidelity prototypes

Key findings

  • Publishing flow required adjustment in journey

  • This involved creating a preview functionality

  • Requirement to improve wording in the back end to make instructions more clear to users

User testing

A workshop was held for the testing of the back end product with 8 users and a sample set of 10 questions.

In April 2018, a small selection of users were welcomed on to the Tour Management System before the project launched on June 6, 2018.

UAT (User Acceptance Testing)

The main purpose of this testing is to validate the end to end business flow. User acceptance testing was performed by both the client as well as Whitespace. We had to develop excellent communication with internal staff - across developers and project managers - to external stakeholders. We worked collaboratively on the final outcome of the project, which went live in June 2018.

Evaluating Performance

Taking an iterative design approach and adopting the agile methodology, I am monitoring the performance of Tours Management System and what updates can be made to improve the user experience. I’ve highlighted some suggestions below.

Back end functionality for Admins

  • Audit log tools to see who changed what and when

  • Ability to create new tour and add new Operators on behalf of Operator

  • Review editor workflows



Front end improvements

  • Add search functionality to allow Tours to be searched by rating and Departure day

  • Automated emails to operators: Tour about to expire 3 days and 1 day before; reminder of draft tours; no operator activity in x amount of time

  • Compare tours

  • TripAdvisor widget Integration

  • How ‘Includes accommodation’ is displayed in results

Back end functionality for Operators

  • Update to be small-screen compatible

  • Image uploader improvements e.g. drag and drop

  • Asset Management/Gallery for Operators - create image database (with specified dimensions and predefined image credits, location and description). Operator can also save their frequently used images to their folder, so they are easily accessible.

  • Implement prompt for unsaved edits