Travel Noire

Background

Travel Noire was founded with one lofty goal in mind: to make international travel more inclusive and representative
for millennial explorers of color. As an award-winning boutique travel company, they’re in the business of helping
travelers get back to their truest selves, inspiring them to discover, plan and experience new destinations.

Design Challenge

As part of the revamp of TravelNoire I was tasked with redesigning the existing site to create an intuitive, aspirational experience that would appeal to novice and veteran travelers alike. The key areas of improvement that needed to be addressed were discoverability, conversion rate for email capture and city guide purchases, and the overall look and feel.

Process

In an effort to address our goals of increased user engagement and email capture the Travel Noire team researched strategies to create a compelling acquisition funnel. The team decided to place premium pieces of content behind a free membership wall to entice users. As part of that membership users would receive the TN newsletter, that would highlight new content that would keep users in the TN ecosystem, as well promote the TN City Guides, in the hopes of increasing sells.

The content for Travel Noire was organized with three use cases in mind: planning a trip, buying a city guide and viewing an article, with content tagged based on destination and topic ( i.e, cuisine, entertainment ). After this initial organization we conducted usability tests to see if users could easily purchase a city guide and find trip planning content based on location. Our findings were that in general users were confused about where to go to find location based content, this led us to make shifts in our organization, condensing our navigation, as well as changing our nomenclature.

Wireframe Sketches

Paramount in the creation of the new TravelNoire was also redesigning the City Guide experience. This included creating a e-commerce experience that allowed users to easily preview and add multiple guides to their cart. As well as taking the guides from their original pdf format and creating an online app-like experience optimized for mobile.

E-Commerce

City Guides

 Clickable Guide

The visual design for TN was born from multiple iterations, some pared down, others more ornate. The final design was meant to be aspirational but inviting, featuring inspiring imagery and a bold use of color representing the natural forms of water, sky, earth, and vegetation.

Visual Exploration

Homepage Animation

Takeaways

Travel Noire proved to be one of the most comprehensive and challenging projects I’ve had the chance to be a part of. Ever evolving content and business strategies behind the brand required that I remain agile and was able to make changes quickly. The importance of testing early and often also proved true as it allowed us to make crucial shifts fairly early in the process.

Responsibilities included: research, wireframing, prototyping, IA, visual design