Trip Planning at Visit Harford

Harford County, located in Maryland USA, has seen year-over-year growth in tourism revenue. However, their tourism website Visit Harford grew stagnant over time and failed to support visitors in planning trips to the county. The goal of this project was to propose new trip-planning features to make the website more engaging.

Client
Harford County Tourism

My Role
UX Research Lead

Team
Ghazaleh Keshavarz, Simone Pimento, Sravya Amancherla

Timeline
6 weeks in Fall 2018

Recommendation for a homepage with engaging visuals, social media posts and visitor reviews.

Problem Statement

Visit Harford provided access to county services, events, and facilities but did not specifically encourage tourist activities. It was most heavily used by 30-40 year-olds. The county wanted to enhance the website to more fully engage business and vacationing visitors and expand its user base beyond the core user group.

Visit Harford website as of December 2018.

Roles and Responsibilities

I took lead on defining the research strategy for our team. This included producing research plans, interview guides and moderating team ideation sessions. Additionally, I collaborated with the team on all research and synthesis tasks, and illustrated our research findings to present to the client. 

Research strategy documents guided the team and set client expectations throughout the project. 

Research Methods

1. Market Analysis
2. Contextual Inquiries
3. Affinity Diagramming
4. Experience Models

To understand how people planned their trips, we interviewed 8 people who had traveled for a vacation trip in the last two months. The interviews consisted of two parts – retrospective questioning and a short trip planning exercise – and helped us answer the following questions:

Key Focus Areas

• What information do people need to select a destination and make trip plans?
• How do they gather this information and what technology do they use?
• What aspect of trip planning and traveling excites them?
• How do we support the different phases - planning, travel, at destination - of a trip?

Each member of the team reviewed 1 travel website, completed 2 interviews and built the Affinity Diagram.

Data Synthesis

Experience models organized our interview data and allowed us to extract actionable insights related to user expectations, personality elements, technology use, and common frustrations with trip planning.

Experience Models created by Aashrey Sharma, Ghazaleh Keshavarz, Sravya Amancherla.

Drivers of User Engagement

Insights from the research pointed to four major themes that drove user engagement when finding information or planning trips on tourism websites.

Diversity of Experience

While planning their trips, many participants searched for experiences unique to the destination, or things they had never done before. To save time, they also looked for nearby activities to do after the main activity was over. 

Visual Delight

Places that looked cool or picturesque drew more attention than others. Participants actively looked for beautiful pictures and videos. In some cases, their trip plans were solely motivated by a cool post they saw on Instagram.

Reviews and Decision Making

Reviews strongly influenced the decision to do an activity. Participants were reluctant to sign up for activities with bad reviews. But surprisingly, they were most frustrated by activities they liked but found few or no reviews for. 

Ease of Planning

A frustration shared by all participants was keeping track of their trip itinerary as they built it. There was no solution to create tentative plans which could accommodate new activities and intelligently resolve scheduling conflicts.

Idea generation through Visioning, a free form sketching exercise with three trip scenarios - solo, with two friends, and with family. 

Client Recommendations

Illustrated recommendations communicated our findings succinctly and allowed the client to visualize how they could engage visitors in trip planning activities at Visit Harford. 

This project was an excellent opportunity to lead and manage a UX research project. While the scope of the project did not include a design cycle, I strongly felt that in addition to a report, illustrating the research recommendations was the best way to present our findings to the client. The client had this to say about the work and the final presentation –

“Mr. Sharma’s graduate project for Visit Harford was for a deliverable we could use moving forward to promote Harford County. It was obvious during the project that Mr. Sharma was not only an integral member of this group but appeared to be looked upon as the de facto leader. During the presentation, Mr. Sharma delivered an excellent work product. The presentation was articulate, clear, and precise.“ - Greg Pizzuto, Executive Director, Visit Harford