Explore Now offers a community-based travel platform that enables its users to connect with like-minded, adventure-driven individuals to build tailor-made travel experiences.
Explore Now’s unique approach focused on personal, exclusive adventures, setting it apart in the travel market. My goal: design an MVP to test this concept and craft the entire customer journey—from inspiration to planning and in-destination stages.
To start, I interviewed adventure travellers, synthesising insights into a journey map, affinity map, and ‘travel tribe’ personas. The journey map highlighted critical touchpoints, guiding the creation of user flows for selecting and booking experiences. Affinity mapping uncovered patterns and key insights that shaped the design direction.
To validate ideas quickly, I adopted a Design Sprint methodology. Using my research, I developed wireframes for destination pages and created a responsive UI for desktop and mobile. Finally, I conducted heuristic evaluations and usability tests with 5 participants to refine the experience.
This project included: Competitor Research, Interviews, Journey Mapping, Affinity Mapping and Personas, Design Sprints, Wireframing, User Interface Design, User Testing (customer experience) and Usability Testing (functionality and task-based user journeys).
Tailor-made travel experiences
Discover remarkable trips around the globe, designed just for you. Your adventure will be unique and packed with magical and authentic experiences.
Understanding Travellers Beyond Demographics
This project emphasised the importance of behavioural insights over traditional demographics like age or gender. By creating personas, empathy maps, and user journeys, I could deeply empathise with users and identify unique travel behaviours.
For instance, some traveller tribes prioritised self-indulgence, blending luxury with self-improvement. Others valued simplicity and convenience, often outsourcing decisions to trusted agents or planners to avoid extensive research.
Know the User, Redefine Adventure
Explore Now targeted a new breed of travellers, requiring a highly personalised approach. It wasn’t just about defining “adventure” broadly but understanding what it meant to each individual. By addressing these nuances, the experience surpassed conventional traveller expectations, creating a truly bespoke journey.
The Research Approach
I conducted initial market research using SurveyMonkey feedback surveys to gather quantitative insights. For deeper qualitative data, I held in-person interviews, sourcing participants through social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook groups, and forums), personal networks, and even coffee shops—offering a free coffee as an incentive.
Through these conversations, I built detailed user profiles, uncovering motivations, preferences, pain points, and concerns. This blend of methods provided a well-rounded understanding of potential travellers, shaping the foundation for the design process.
Boosting Engagement Through Action and Storytelling
In user feedback, action verbs like explore, discover, see, belong, and share stood out. These terms reflect an active mindset, inspiring users to engage deeply with the site. To harness this, I integrated a dedicated section for real travellers to share their stories. Personal narratives were key to immersing users in the adventure and fostering connection.
Make It Personal
Real-life adventures resonate far more than traditional marketing. By adding social proof—reviews, recommendations, and personal stories—the site built trust and aligned with the behaviour of travel tribes. This emotional connection not only increased engagement but also encouraged users to see themselves within the community.
From Stories to Prototypes
Using prioritised user stories, I developed a sitemap and sketched initial wireframes. Once the vision solidified, I transitioned to Sketch for digital designs and connected them in InVision for high-fidelity prototype testing. This iterative approach ensured the MVP captured key user needs while maintaining focus on engagement and usability.
Designing for Trust and Immersion
To deliver a sleek, trustworthy, and immersive app experience, I focused on four key principles: transparency, minimalism, ease of use, and agility. Trust was critical—without it, users could abandon the app, resulting in poor reviews, low ratings, or uninstalls. The interface needed to be distraction-free, inspiring wanderlust while empowering users to craft and share their adventures with the tribe.
The challenge
This platform’s foundation was trust — booking based on community-driven experiences. Building a trustworthy, seamless platform that worked across web and mobile was no small feat. It also required optimising the journey to remove signup barriers and boost conversion rates.
Key takeaways
By addressing key insights, the MVP offered an intuitive and engaging experience that catered to a wide spectrum of adventurers.
Price, trust, and safety were the top factors influencing bookings.
Travellers relied on reviews and photos to validate their choices.
Traditional categories like sightseeing and adventure weren’t enough; this project drilled further, identifying groups like solo travellers, thrill-seekers, and self-improvers to personalise the experience further.