Pain Points

With a few notes in mind, I gathered a collection of Pain Points that I felt the redesign had to address first.

1. Confusing wording and repetition (find your cruise, find your dream cruise, find cruises, cruise finder)
2. Icons next to dropdowns too small
3. Pixelated imagery
4. No clear CTA to explore down the page.
5. Hero takes up entire starting window
6. No sticky nav, stays at top of page
7. Can't clear all dropdown selections
8. Nav bar gets kind of lost in white on the crazy background
9. No Hover Animations
10. "Find you dream cruise" button not clearly a "go/search" button

Individual Cruise Page Pain Points

1. No clear CTA
2. Cruise Itinerary is important, but feels overly simplified
3. Pixelated imagery
4. "Price Prediction" drop down is primarily a demo on how to turn on notifications more than anything else
5. Massive Icons
6. A lot of text is the same size. and color. not a lot of hierarchy
7. What does the % icon mean on the room buttons? Is it a sale?

Closing Thoughts

The process of redesigning this site, and fully exploring the UX process, has been incredibly informative and interesting to say the least. One of the biggest take aways I have from this whole process, is the importance of user testing. At least for me, I feel like I can get really caught up on one idea, and almost be blind to the idea that it may not be all that great, or not take someone else's idea into account that more than likely will greatly improve my project.

That is where the user testing really came in and changed the entire flow of this project. The process flow, followed by revising through the card sort activity, completely restructured what I had intended to do for the navigation, and I think the new version is far stronger than before. Overall the UX process is one that blends the psychological reasoning of the user you are trying to predict how they will interact with your site, while also designing it in a way that at first, they will absolutely not use in the way you thought.

The individual cruise page was incredibly interesting from a UX perspective. The initial version of the mobile cruise page, relied very heavily upon data visualization in an overcrowded, non-intuitive, system of accordion menus. This was the main thing I wanted to tackle in my redesign. So to start the process I developed a low fidelity wireframe that ditched the accordion style, and made most of the important information readily available, as opposed to buried on separate pages.

One of the requirements in the brief was to redesign the itinerary, so in order to make it more user friendly and helpful, I included images and a brief descriptions to reduce the vague ominous original itinerary. Once this new and improved user flow was created, I developed a journey map for my three personas in order to more accurately test the high fidelity prototypes. Following a few rounds of tests and edits, the final prototype as seen above emerged. The entire process was very inciteful, and showed another method in which to user test and iterate a design in order to develop the most efficient and streamlined product for the user.