Responses by Tank Design

Background: The purpose of DuVine’s website is twofold—to inspire wanderlust and to be informative for users to book international cycling/adventure tours. The target customer is an avid traveler who seeks to experience a country beyond the typical tourist attractions.

Highlights: When speaking to a number of tour participants, we discovered that the online tools would need to achieve a balance of utility for users who have specific dates and destinations in mind and those who are looking to explore options. From this emerged the “Find a Tour” tool, where users can personalize their results based on their specific interests, cultural experiences or preferred landscapes.

Challenges: Our customer research showed that the experiential, intimate nature of a DuVine tour differentiated it from the competition; so the primary challenge for the redesign was capturing that intangible quality of local experiences online. There were also a lot of detailed business needs that we needed to solve for—like reducing customer service calls and adding more content for frequently asked questions.

Favorite details: We are most proud of the overall aesthetic and the individual tour pages. We spent a significant time sweating the details like the dashboard, table of contents, immersive image grid and organization/presentation of itinerary and dates. We feel they are successful in balancing the aspirational and transactional information.

Navigational structure: For the site’s primary navigation, we wanted to highlight the popularity of different regions inside a country, while still showcasing the breadth of tour offerings. It needed to be usable for all site visitors, regardless of destination focus. We also added a prominent search module on the homepage as a quick entry point for finding relevant tours.

Anything new: The “Find a Tour” tool was incredibly complex to build and test. We had to not only learn how to create a balance between giving users many options to search and filter, ensuring that the tool would generate relevant results, but also determine the order of the results listed.