Princess Cruise Web App Redesign - UI/UX
Inspiration:
In my spare time, I’ve created a personal project. I drew inspiration from my personal experience using the web page on Princess Cruise.
I was on a trip from Shanghai to Japan on Majestic Princess Cruise. After fully exploring princess at sea, a web application that provides information about daily events and more about the trip, I found there is a “Planner” feature that people would rarely touch. However, according to a survey, people would like to plan their daily life to some degree. The conflict is the target of this redesign.
Stakeholders:
Passengers from China, age range 20-50
We chose these people as target audience because they are the main cruise passengers in China. Most people in this range would have relatively high income and will to buy paid items on cruise ships. These people would also have better knowledge in how to use mobile devices.
Cruise Ship company: Princess Cruise
Project Team:
Myself! And all people who helped me: 70+ survey responses, Kristen Shiozaki, Cherry Wang (Princess Cruise China Regional Vice President), David deMorlie (former Vice President of marketing for Princess Cruise), and more.
Background Information:
On Cruise ships, usually, there is an informative page people can access with cruise wifi. It has functions like looking up daily events and connecting to the internet with paid plans.
Problem Statement:
Design a cleaner web app that provides promotion for Princess Cruise and focuses on more frequently used functions to improve the user experience for the cruise passengers.
Research:
The approach I used is starting from my personal experience and some pain points I had when interacting with the web app. Then I used surveys to look for opinions from other people on those specific “pain points” in my opinions.
-Survey Takers:
During the data collection process, I sent surveys to all my family and friends through wenjuanxing (directly translated to survey star) which is the top Chinese survey platform. I received 28 responses from my friends back in China. Gathering all the data, about half (15 out of 28) people have traveled with a cruise line before. More analysis can be found in Appendix.
Observation #1:
During my personal interaction with the web app, although the planner feature can be accessed quickly through a button on the main page; however, including myself, I have seen nobody using this feature. I designed this question in the survey based on this observation.
From this question, I can conclude there is a need for the planner feature in the onboard life. After some brief interviews with survey takers, they responded that they would always have a plan in mind due to the fast pace life in China; sometimes they would mark it down, sometimes not. Hence, there is a conflict between the two: people need such a feature but they are not using the current one.
The first bar represents 1 which is not planning at all. The right-most bar represents 5 which is planning every meal and event using calenders. Note: Y bar represents percentages; it doesn’t indicate the actual number of people responding.
The second observation would be the promotion problem. The cruise ship’s promotion for onboard consumption is only through passive ways, which means sometimes the passengers can’t notice that there is a duty-free shop or a paid dining place without fully exploring the ship. According to the survey question “which three paid items are most attractive?” The result suggests that paid dining and duty-free shops have the highest marks.
In addition, for people who haven’t been on cruise ships before, the result of the survey question “Which of the following paid services are you not aware of?” Over 38% of people picked duty-free shops and gallery photos. If we can use this app to actively tell them that these features exist, the onboard revenue could be increased. This idea is also verified in the interview with Cherry Wang, the vice president of the China region for Princess Cruise.
The first row from the left is duty-free shops, then paid dining/drinks, paid activities/events, paid service(spa), gallery photo purchase, customer service(laundry), and art pieces auctions.
Persona:
From the previous research data, I have made this persona for a typical user in the Chinese market. Some key characteristics are:
Low will/time to explore the ship since the voyage is short
Has a need for planner due to life habits
Low knowledge level about the ship since there are lots of cruise ships in China
From the previous research data, I have made this persona for a typical user in the Chinese market. Some key characteristics are:
Low will/time to explore the ship since the voyage is short
Has a need for planner due to life habits
Low knowledge level about the ship since there are lots of cruise ships in China
Wireframe:
High Fidelity:
Feature Breakdown:
This is the breakdown of an activity card.
This is the breakdown of a restuarant card.
By including restaurant, it helps the passengers explore. In the meantime, the design can also promote paid restaurant for cruiseship.
More Screens
Summary:
In this project, I managed to go through every stage in a redesign project. This made me know how to integrate UX data into UI features and do user testing based on mockups. In the middle, I have received data which is opposite of my assumptions, which is quite surprising at the moment. However, I am able to adjust my scope and use the updated knowledge of users’ mental model in the design. The project gave me some new understanding on the workflow of a UI/UX project and more experience in the process.