designing the interactivity

Ulysses Technologies, a young start-up company by three recent graduates, approached me to design a travel portal for them. What should the portal provide to help young professional couples, the would-be travellers, swiftly decide on a best and memorable holiday destination? That was the question!

FIGURE 1: Home Page of the Interactive Tourer Website.

As I always took a view (Rahardja, 1999) that design must first and foremost take into consideration of all stakeholders' goals and needs, identifying the stakeholders became the first step in the design endeavour. That was the difficult part but nonetheless, in this case, the stakeholders included the travel agencies and other potential advertisers besides the users of the website.

I redefined the goals of the website together with the client - from providing information on next holiday destination to experience of the destination, and value proposition to potential advertisers so that the portal could better secure advertising contracts.

The design solution comprised the following four elements:

FIGURE 2: The destination
at a glance page.

Capture Attention: The home page (Figure 1) featured a weekly destination and its attractions. Users could watch the video clip of the destination, which was created from the perspectives of the users and the travel agent, as well as the needs of the client's or the portal owner.

Generate Interest: The "destination at a glance" page (Figure 2) is a method to generate interest on a destination. The slide show at the top right hand corner aimed to further capture the interest of the users.

FIGURE 3: Detailed 
destination page with sponsor.

Volunteer Information: By volunteering significant information of interest to the users (Figure 3), we would be helping the users make a swift and good decision. The interaction elements were carefully crafted and seamlessly integrated to show the attraction map and its surrounding attractions, photo gallery, travelers' comments and reviews.

When the users were ready to make a buy decision, the sponsor's "call to action" button for a tour package would be conveniently available to the users.

FIGURE 4: Sponsor page.

Balance Stakeholders' Goals: The sponsor page (Figure 4) included value added services provided by the sponsor such as tour packages in attractive pricing.

Reference:
Rahardja, A. (1999). Designing interactivity: Who are the users and what are the techniques. In Proceedings of The Fifth Australian World Wide Web Conference. NSW: Australia. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw99/papers/rahardja/paper.html