No mainstream online marketplace existed for travelers in India & Nepal to find and compare multi-day tours and packaged travel experiences, yet demand was on the rise. There was a need and opportunity for a specialty-reviews and search site that catered to the unique needs of customers looking for a multi-day tour – not just a day tour. No search engines existed for multi-day tours and adventure trips and the major reviews websites did not have a category for this type of travel. Additionally, the organized leisure travel was a large market in aggregate, though small relative to the total travel space, with limited competition.

Three key trends that required to be addressed:
First, consumers want to explore more parts of the globe, but they want to do it in comfort and within a specific budget. Secondly, many forms of organized travel, like adventure trips and river cruises, are gaining popularity. Consumers are busier than ever and don't want to spend time planning the logistics of multi-destination international trips themselves. Many prefer not to rely on agents. Finally, practically all consumers today start their research online for any major purchase. They expect an easy way to find trustworthy reviews from a third party.

In short, consumers had to do a lot of grunt work from fixing upon a travel date, finding available activities during that period, visiting different OTA websites to see how much they are charging and what they are offering at that price point, reading user reviews and travel blogs from various sources, and comparing and processing all of this before making a decision. Once the decision was made, it was time for preparing for that activity (if it was a multi-day adventure). It was tedious to make a note of every item that you would need and then look out for them on the internet to buy them.

There was a need and a market to bring search, trustworthy information, reviews, ratings, and e-commerce under one roof.

Surveys & User Research

A user survey was conducted to collect information and data points about consumers' needs and factors that influence their decision. It gave me metrics about consumers' travel choices, how they plan their travel, what do they consider on a trip and what they would like to see in a service like Montero. It helped me identify my potential users and their level of understanding with technology, pain points & frustrations, needs and wants. The User Survey pointed out some key characteristics of how people plan their travel and adventure trips in particular.

User Personas

Based on the survey respondents and after identifying my potential users, I interviewed 12 of them to know more about their travel experiences, how they would plan their travel and adventure trips in particular, what considerations they make, what inspires them to choose a travel destination, and if they are willing to suggest improvements in the existing adventure travel booking services. I clubbed similar users into one bucket and created three unique user personas to summarize their goals, needs and their frustrations regarding adventure travel.

Competitive Analysis

Competition falls into a couple of buckets for Montero given our unique model and product focus. If you look at multi-day tours, there are several specialty OTAs, some who transitioned from being traditional offline travel agencies. However, their model is different. As for an OTA like Trodly, they are incentivized to hide the supplier brand name and induce users to book on their site with their small number of preferred tour operators. Montero has an open meta search reviews model, and we aim to show all relevant brands regardless of whether we have a direct commercial relationship. We put the user experience first.

Which brings us to bucket two – review sites. TripAdvisor is a big ‘competitor' in terms of general traveler expectations around reviews. However they do not have a category for multi-day tour operators and actually specifically prohibit multiday tour operators on their listing page qualifications.

Thrillophilia & Stride are direct competitors but their revenue model is not cost-per-click (CPC). Also, Thrillophilia operates more like an OTA rather a travel activity search platform. Stride is not very popular in India and the tours are not specifically tailored to suit Indian travelers.

User Stories

The next step in the design process was to organize everything and give a structure to the app. This is known as Information Architecture. I started by defining the minimum requirements or deliverables for the app by drafting the User Stories.

User Stories is an exercise to put the users' needs and goals and competitors' features into different user type buckets. In general, there are three user types: new user, returning user and all users. The information collected from surveys, interviews and competitive analysis has to be grouped into these user types accordingly. That lays the foundation for the next step i.e. wireframes and defines my MVP goals in a clear way.

User Flows & Sitemap

User Flows are flowchart diagrams that explain the different processes involved in accomplishing a task from your MVP. It lays out steps & actions in a particular order and sequence that the user needs to undertake in order to get to the end of the task.

Since it's a meta-search engine based on CPC business model, the most important user flow is for a user to click on a deal that appeals the most. There are several user-flows that explain how other tasks are to be done. Besides, the sitemap explains the skeleton on what the site is built upon.

Wireframes & Hi-Fi Mockups

Wireframe sketching is the first step where you translate written matter into its visual layout. They are low fidelity in nature and does not contain an actual copy. They help you to decide the visual layout by placing appropriate UI elements and sizing them accordingly.

Design Mockups

This section marks the beginning of UI deliverables. It's the most exciting part of the design process. It's also the most comprehensive and crucial project stage as it involves designing detailed mockups of the website, designing the logo, choosing an appropriate color scheme and typeface and eventually setting up a style guide that describes the usage of each type of design elements used in the website and also speaks a few words about the brand, Montero.

Following the framework established in the wireframes & hi-fi mockups, I created polished design mockups each with proper alignment. size, color, and suitable imagery. I conducted preference tests to base my design decisions.

Preference Tests

I conducted a handful of preference tests to determine what design style regarding certain UI components was the most preferred one.

A couple of examples down here.

Logo Design

The Montero logo is a universal signature we use across all our communications. We want it to be instantly recognizable, so consistency is important please don't edit, change, distort, recolor, or reconfigure it.

It has a very modern appeal to it and conveys the user that the information on this website is related to mountains or adventure activities in the mountains. Besides, it reads the letter "M" while eyeballing it.

The colors used in the creation of logo are different shades of Bluish green (Teal) resembling a range of mountains situated behind one another (cascading mountains). There's a fresh gradient ranging from dark red to yellow which symbolizes the sky at sunset. To provide sufficient contrast between the gradient & the shades of teal, white color is used to symbolize the snow-capped mountain peaks.

The logo as a whole appears to be in a 3-point perspective with the mountains inclined & vanishing towards the left & right.

Color Palette

The primary color palette is made up of a complimentary color scheme consisting of orange & shades of teal. Some primary colors are taken from the colors found in the logo. The secondary color palette consists a mix of colors each one suiting a specific purpose in the context.

Typography

We use just one typeface for Montero, namely Montserrat.

Montserrat is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Argentinian designer Julieta Ulanovsky. The design was inspired by signage from her historical Buenos Aires neighborhood of the same name.

The Montserrat font family has nine weights, extra light, thin, light, regular, medium, semi-bold, bold, extra-bold, and black. The variety of weights further aids its versatility and usability.

Fun and geometric letterforms make this font approachable with a sense of warmth and energy. On the flip-side, it is also refined, strong and highly-legible. Overall, a very versatile typeface.

Montero Style Guide & Design System

Our brand, and how we use it.

This is the Montero style guide & design system. Here you'll read about our lovingly crafted brand, its graphics assets, as well as internal guidelines for using these various resources.

The goal of these guidelines is to prevent Montero from being used to trick or confuse anyone looking for official Montero resources and to clarify how legitimate Montero-related businesses and projects can legally use them.

It consists of information on our logo, color, typography, photography and various UI elements that form the product.

Prototype & User Testing

The final stage was to develop an Interactive prototype of the service.

Since the whole prototype contained a lot of screens and there were so many important tasks a user could perform within the service, I developed a Maze with 9 missions in the Maze app where the user is given a script to complete a particular task (mission).

Analysis:

• Homepage Design:
• Upvote: Great graphics, easy to find everything, gets straight into onboarding
• Downvote: Sometimes content can be overwhelming.

• Search Results:
• Upvote: Pretty straightforward design, gives almost all possible information in one place.Adheres to the MVP.
• Downvote: Design can be made smaller in size to cater to smaller desktop sizes.

• Maze Test:
• Upvote: The script is interesting as it contains a lot of subtle hints & guidelines to solve a task. Some loved the challenge of getting to the end of a mission.
• Downvote: Some tasks were too long & the direct path to success was shortened as Maze only looks at the end screen & not the actual path. Maze test was failing due to heavy graphics used for the prototype. Interactive states led to a lot of confusion as it resulted in double-clicks and that frustrated the testers, so they gave up some of the missions.