What a Life Tours
What a Life Tours is a tours and activities operator tiered between global giants like Viator, TripAdvisor, and Expedia and smaller local tour companies operating in specific geographical niches.
The company's greatest asset is its potential, thanks to the highest customer rating it has maintained on TripAdvisor since 2011.
The opportunity was to provide What a Life Tours with a digital experience worthy of its ambitions, a challenge that I was awarded with when I came on to head up content strategy, UX, and brand.
My first action was to carry out assessments of the company's digital assets, producing a backlog of improvements and potential user pain points. Impact was swift, and the company experienced peaks of 120% in YoY revenue growth in my first 6 months thanks to the changes implemented.
The foundations for these results were applied Design Thinking and Lean UX to create a virtuous circle that zeroed-in on evolving user needs with each design iteration.
The new What a Life Tours homepage is a good point of departure to provide examples of what my content strategy entailed. The website on the whole did not require an entirely new structure, but what was there required an overhaul often reaching to the minutest detail.
Any foray into how users will experience a digital product must begin with the users themselves. This was not my first experience in the tourism vertical, so I had a well-informed toolkit, however it is never advisable to base work on previous assumptions, and they should always be tested.
Boiled-down to its most reduced sauce, it was necessary to learn what users want from the product, and how it would change their experiences. In terms of content strategy, this includes the entire life-cycle from exploration to goal completion, as well as how their feelings evolved thereafter.
In the specific case of What a Life Tours this meant mirroring what users hope to achieve through their purchase, and putting them in that moment before they put their products in the cart, or enter their payment information.
The research phase came about through brainstorming and interview sessions with stakeholders, team members, tour guides, as well as customers, which combined with competitor analysis, produced the affinity maps and personas to inform decision-making along the way.
Through this strategy and research results, I developed a content system through the eyes of the user, paying close attention to portraying the fulfillment of their desires in every interaction they had with What a Life Tours' digital products. Specifically, this was designed to pull them into their destination and show them the what and how of their future experience.
One of the first features I overhauled that involved both content and UX strategy was customer reviews. Reviews had not been implemented site-wide, and had an unacceptable UI on the homepage. This was a necessity from a competitive standpoint, but also to create value for new users from former customer experiences.
3rd party reviews applications did not satisfy requirements, so I had the development team built the structure onto the site's back end to feature on both the home and product pages. I designed the UI layout and functionality that was handed over for development, as well as ensured technical requirements were met for our stars to appear in Google search results.
This is only one of literally hundreds of changes I made. For a macro perspective over the revolution in look and feel, as well as how attention to detail worked to create a sum greater than its parts, take a look at the NEW WAL HOMEPAGE vs. the OLD WAL HOMEPAGE.
I also produced new content assets to be featured on the homepage in support of the brand's digital overhaul like the new BRAND VIDEO.
The product pages too were in need of content that focused more on user needs in everything from the section titles, to the product value proposition, and product description, not to mention images and video.
My content strategy aimed to create relationships and flow between every component on the page, whether content or dynamic UI. All with the singular purpose of making the user feel that this site was created for them.
It goes without saying that other tools of the trade were necessary to tune the site perfectly to user behavior. As soon as I finished the initial site clean-up and backlog, I implemented heat maps and user recordings to uncover possible issues for potentially every single user.
This covered breakpoints, menu placement/length, component order, as well as fixing important functionalities on high-performing PPC campaign landing pages to meet user intent and expectations as surgically as possible.
In the example below, heat maps (together with data from Google Analytics) confirmed a high volume of dead clicks on a very expensive page:
The problem was that users could not choose their tour dates without re-selecting the correct category filter, creating a redundancy since they had already landed on a specific category page through a specific search query.
My solution was to set the category filter by default and remove the field entirely, so that users would only have to select information relevant to the position in their journey. As surprised as I was to see that this had been overlooked, the boost in page performance was no surprise at all.
I kept a mobile-first approach to all design decisions to ensure that users, particularly those during the inspirational research phase (the most important 'hook period' in travel) had a best-in-class experience that would bring them back to complete a booking as their itineraries crystalized.
I also led the development of an important new feature inside the What a Life Tours booking widget. In this case the user need was internal stemming from the necessity to develop a way to apply single slot discounts to unsold tickets. The great thing is that it also benefited users, who were able to get last-minute discounts.
What's better than satisfying user and business goals at the same time?
