Vacation with Nagel
Nagel Tours is a family-run Canadian tour company that has been touring the continent for over 40 years in its brightly coloured fuchsia and magenta coaches. Catering to retirees that are becoming increasingly tech-savvy, Nagel Tours wanted to improve the web experience for customers. Their website was a difficult to read black screen with a list of pdf links, and did not showcase the amazing sights and experiences of travel.
CMS Platform: WordPress
Agency: Primal Tribe
Challenge
How might we make searching for a tour a more delightful and intuitive experience?
Nagel Tours, Before
Research
Designing tech that will be primarily used by seniors comes with some important design considerations. We dove into the user needs in consultation with our client and discovered a few crucial elements.
Insight 1:
Seniors have unique requirements for their tours
Users needed a better way to discover and search for tours that fit their specifications. For instance: renewing passports was a cumbersome hurdle for many users, so those without passports had to spend time searching through tour listings to find ones that might not require a passport, and then had to call the travel agent to confirm.
Need:
Add a search and filter ability that allowed users to refine searches not just by location, but also by passport needs, tour length, and mode of transportation involved.
Insight 2:
Accommodate different reviewing preferences
While we might have an urge to go full digital, our users were a mix of new-school and old-school. It was common for users to print off a copy of the tour to show to family and carry with them when travelling.
Need:
Include access to a downloadable pdf version of the tour details for easy home printing.
Insight 3:
Visualize the experience
The whole point of travelling is to see and experience new places, yet the Nagel Tours site presented the user with a list of links. It was not encouraging people to book tours or feel excitement or delight about their next travel experience.
Need:
Utilize photography or video to showcase the amazing experience of the tour and help users understand what they would see on their tour.
Insight 4:
Keep the fuchsia brand
Nagel was very attached to their visual branding, and well known as the fuchsia travel company. Even their coaches are decked to the nines in the noticeable colour.
Need:
Keep Nagel’s existing logo and brand palette, and echo it on the website.
Design
After kick-off meetings with the client, I lead our team through a workshop where we reviewed the user’s needs and then built out a new sitemap and a list of essential key features. My wireframes went through a couple of iterations as we refined the hierarchy of elements and reviewed with stakeholders. I then used these wireframes to build out high-fidelity prototypes of key pages, utilizing Nagel Tours’ brand specifications (much fuchsia).
The site was built on WordPress using Divi Builder in order to allow the Nagel Tours staff to update as needed. This creates technical limitations where we have to see what plugins we can use and which modules we can modify to suit our needs without exceeding budget. We focused on building a custom tours module that was easily editable by Nagel staff and enjoyable for users to navigate.
Further
Making an online booking process was deemed out of scope for this particular project, but I believe it could improve the user experience. Currently, the tours feature “Contact Us” buttons that instruct you to send an email inquiry or call during business hours. Additional accessibility features (besides those available in-browser) would have been good to include, especially for this audience. In particular, a font-size increaser and audio options.
If usable, equitable, enjoyable, and useful design is your thing, then…