NWT Tourism Gap Analysis

Client: Spectacular Northwest Territories

Role: Research and Design Lead

Project Timeline: 4 months

Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes

Summary

The Northwest Territories (NWT) is one of Canada’s most unique and premier destinations – known for its adventure and Northern Lights. The Spectacular Northwest Territories website is meant to promote the destination, attract travellers and facilitate their travel planning.

With consideration of piecemeal refinements and new ways of travel planning, there was opportunity to run a Discovery project to understand how the website is performing to meet traveler’s needs, and where there are gaps.

Goals

Identify content issues
Identify UX issues
Understand best practices of other DMO websites
Early reccos for site improvements

Approach

To understand where there are gaps in the current experience, understand opportunities and make recommendations for the client, the project was broken out into 3 primary activities within the context of the customer journey. Not knowing when the client will continue the refinement work of the experience, it was important to deliver comprehensive artefacts for each of these activities to provide documentation and recommendations. These were delivered as topline reports for each phase of work and a final key takeaways and recommendations presentation.

Customer journey phases of travel planning that informed the project’s activity phases.

Project Phases

Content and UX Audit

A content and UX audit was completed against core areas of the site from levels 0-3 and across page types. This audit was completed to:

Identify content purpose categories
Content awareness hierarchies
Product categories
Content and UX heuristic
Edit type reccos for content and UX

Jurisdictional Scan

Seven DMO websites were chosen based on alignment with NWT’s target audience, type of travel and client inspiration. The DMOs were audited against:

General information architecture and content categories
General UX
Standout features valuable for travellers

User Research

We wanted to understand more about travellers and the target audience, especially with the advent of new technologies to facilitate travel and planning. The research set out to:

Identify travel triggers
Understand the unique ways that travellers approach travel planning
Benchmark test the current experience to identify gaps

The Work

Content and UX Audit

Database table showing the Content and UX audit results of page/page types against top 3 heuristics for content and UX and key recommendation categories for each page/page type

Key Findings

Content

The content audit saw the opportunities to:

Reduce cognitive load by simplifying information architecture and content categories
Develop a content strategy to target engagement with more short form copy and guidelines around new, dynamic and archived content.

User Experience Design

The UX audit saw the opportunities to:

Refine UX interaction details for newer features to facilitate the user journey
Net new features to facilitate the user journey
Coalesce new and older parts of the website to achieve consistency in look and feel

Jurisdictional Scan

Visual sitemap of other relevant DMOs showing IA of the website and general page type structure including primary structure of the page such as content types, content blocking, UX and reading order.

Key Findings

Notable Features

The jurisdictional scan saw some shared notable features including:

Contextual maps that visually show location of regions, accommodation, attractions, shops, outfitters and restaurants
Cultural content relevant to the destination including navigating cultural norms, language, etc
Environmental sustainability content and education

General Observations

The jurisdictional scan saw some themes across the general experience including:

All DMOs have forms of content guiding travellers on where to go and what to do at the destination, but in varying permutations of IA and nomenclature.
AI and Chatbots are beginning to increase in usage across DMOs. Adoption is still in nascency.
DMOs generally take a long or short form approach to page content

User Research

Sample of results of one of the studies that demonstrates a design survey on relevant features travellers would want to see to facilitate their user journey needs

Key findings

What Users Need

The research discovered new information and validated hypotheses including:

A deeper understanding of the various ways in which travellers plan for their travel, including their process and types of systems used
Features that facilitate the customer journey
Real world reviews are important content types that travellers look for

UX Patterns

The research studies helped us learn that:

Short-form content is generally more favourably received vs. long form. Long from content can be valuable but as nice-to have content.
Nesting pages within a category vs. rolling up all the content into a singular page in summary format requires more research
Different IA approaches for What to Do and Where to Go content requires more research

Outcomes

As a Discovery project, we were able to deliver robust assessment on the heuristic performance of the current experience, best practices, how prospective travellers feel about the current experience and what kind of experience they would be looking for.

This has allowed the SNWT team to be able to more effectively understand where they are and what a roadmap for work looks like including being able to more effectively:

Consider budget and timeline needs
Size and plan epics
Effectively plan for the right expertise to carry out the work
Assess incremental improvements or big-bang approaches to the work