Scubago
Designing for diving experiences
In this project our vision was to design a marketplace for diving experiences with a goal to seamlessly provide liveaboards, dive resorts, dive destinations and various dive programs within the same platform.
Our approach was to structure a website where different providers of diving experiences could market their services to a specific target group with a focus on diving, marine life or simply travel for leisure.
- Timeline
- 11 months
- Role
- Product design
- Front-end framework
- Client
- Mares SSI Diving
- Head
- Industry
- OTA
- Travel activities
The challenge
Merge all experiences into one
The most difficult part of this project was to combine four different types of diving experiences into one and at the same time maintain a fairly identical experience when a user selects and then reserves one of them.
Designing a user flow for selecting a cabin in liveaboard, picking a room in a resort, or signing up for a diving activity were the challenges we were facing.
Research phase
Understand scope and product strategy
One of my roles in this project was to do market research and to understand the typical user with the purpose to collect knowledge around diving offerings in general.
This helped us to quickly sketch out ideas in high level user flows and to create journey maps, and later align these with user goals, product strategy and design direction.
- Understand who the potential target audience are
- Discover audience based on their diving knowledge and experience
- Collect knowledge around diving experiences and availability
- Understand available offerings and their requirements
Empathy mapping
Understanding needs and challenges
To gain a deeper understanding of potential opportunities in our initial journey maps, we arranged a few interviews with potential customers and service providers.
This helped us to identify features that could be changed or added and which also could improve the overall experience of these users' needs and bring value to the business.
Competitive audit
Picking the best bits out of competitors
Once we had a fair idea of what we wanted to offer to our potential target groups, we went to a few direct and indirect competitors to research ideas and solutions for similar services.
We sat down to benchmark what a user would expect from various similar services. This helped us to visualize our different user journeys and also uncover areas for improvements.
- Knowledge helped us arrange information architecture
- Directions helped us start sketching out high-level wireframes
- Audits gave us ideas on how to solve early problems in our design
- Benchmarking revealed gaps in current services based on the audience's needs
- Observations gave us insight on user research subjects
Do I trust this center and does it offer what I am looking for. Does it offer it at the right time, and at the right price.
Service design
Two platforms with unified services
We early on understood that we had to design for two platforms and that there would be seamless and unified connection between offerings and services.
Divers would visit Scubago to explore, learn and book diving experiences, while managing trips, courses, business, and connecting with divers would happen in Scubadesk.
The concept
To promote user guided discovery
We decided that all landing pages should have easy access to a search and each one of these pages would be focused on destinations, marine life, season of the year or various types of diving activities.
This would help users to discover and get inspiration rather than be forced to choose from what was presented.
Research guerrilla style
Validating components of importance
Once we had a first set of design and prototypes ready, we set out to do quick guerilla testing on primary user journeys to validate our assumptions and hypotheses in design direction.
We learned that we had to make interactions to select a trip, accommodation or activity, slightly different based on reservation journeys and the host selected for an experience.
Key findings
Keeping it simple and elegant
With various types of accommodation types and a vast amount of activities related to these diving experiences, we had to find a simple, light, elegant and a unified design language.
It also required us to focus on how a user easily could understand what is included in a reservation and how to add additional activities on top of what was selected.
The layout
Reusing design components
To help a user to discover, understand and take actions, we had to unify and simplify layout to be reused on multiple pages.
This also helped us to keep the code base smaller with less elements to design and our pages became more modular with small building blocks.
User interface
Guiding a user to take action
In most cases diving activities are based on season and to combine that with accommodation was a challenge. After various iterations, we decided that suggesting travel dates would help users to take actions.
That also helped us to add or upsell activities based on travel dates rather than the other way around.
Design language
Bringing the best together
The fun part of this project was to find inspiration from various marketplaces and bring the best parts together into a unified design that would work for liveaboards, resorts, and centers.
The tricky part was to ensure that all these different diving experiences could be selected, reserved and booked in the same platform and it all would have a unified design language.
Communication
Self-service and my account
This project was built as a tool between a host and a customer and can easily be comparable to an Airbnb platform for diving experiences.
The last part in this project was to enable direct communication between a host and customer, so we had to spend a bit of time designing an area for my account and associated email communication.
The result
A complete platform for diving enthusiasts
This project was based on several different parts that all were put together to provide the best marketplace platform for diving activities, both from a host point of view and as a customer.
This included everything from managing a business, to controlling website content and finally to enable customers to take part and to help them discover their next holiday activity.
- 6
- Unique Systems
- 162
- Design Templates
- 86
- HTML Templates
- 3892
- Cups of coffee
