Away to Africa
Away to Africa creates luxury, themed group trips to Africa. The company asked us to create something that would allow it to scale so that it could secure access to venture capital and focus on developing the luxury aspect of the business.
Role: UX Researcher and Designer
Duration: 3 weeks
Contribution: I studied the travel landscape to understand how Away to Africa was positioned in the market and illustrated key takeaways from user interviews to communicate purpose to the design team.
Platform: Mobile
Team size: 6
Competitive Strengths: Local tour guides and personally vetted tours
The CEO personally goes on each tour before it becomes available. Tour guides local to the destination countries give travelers the authentic, knowledgeable experience for which they are looking.
When we compared Away to Africa to three other travel companies, we found that these are unique to the business.
Our goal: automate repetitive tasks for the CEO.
To find repetitive tasks to automate, we created a service blueprint. We found that the CEO was spending time on pre-planned trips doing repetitive tasks, such as:
With these tasks automated, the CEO could could spend time creating personalized, luxury, custom trips and vetting new tours.
These are the true strengths of the business.
1. Creating and Sending Documents
Storing documents in the app allowed us to automate the process for the CEO, removing the need to create the documents in Google Drive.
2. Answering Questions Preemptively
In our design studio, we asked, How might we present the answers to these pre-trip questions? We began designing weather widgets, document pages, checklists, and maps, then turned these into low fidelity wireframes.
3. Messaging Groups
We expect that creating community would further ease users’ concerns and create enthusiasm and positive anticipation for the trips while also delegating the question-answer process to other travelers. This would also remove the CEO’s need to set these groups up herself.
Clients love the trips.
They love getting unique experiences through local tour guides. Whenever an issue arose, Away to Africa handled it quickly and easily, whether it was their responsibility or not. We asked,
“How might we connect people who love the trips with people who have questions?”
This would free up the CEO’s time, establish legitimacy for prospective clients, and build community among clients.
We created an “ambassador” tag for willing mentors
This would reduce the amount of time the CEO spent answering questions, and be one step in the direction of allowing the company to scale.
Luxury. Excitement. Energy.
To communicate the luxury of the brand, and to stay consistent with the website, we used black as our main color. This also allowed us to weave beautiful images from Africa throughout our app. Our secondary color, yellow, brings the excitement of Africa. We applied this treatment to all of our wireframes in order to create something consistent and coherent.
“Happy clients are always asking how they can help, so I love this design.”
The CEO of Away to Africa loved the design, not only because we’d incorporated the things she’d asked for, but also because we had done so in a way that had leveraged one of the company’s strengths: clients who loved their trips so much that they wanted to share their experience with others.