Case Study: Tracks & Trails

Tracks & Trails

This project combined a unique niche travel industry relationship with a significant information architecture, search functionality, and visual design challenge. The Tracks & Trails team are expert travel planners with extensive knowledge and experience of the American West. In addition to creating an online presence that would enable them to market their unique trip-planning approach to a wider audience, Tracks & Trails also wanted to translate their vast geographic knowledge into an easily searchable, online tourism resource...

Industry:
Tourism

Price Range:
$50k- $75k

The Client

The Tracks & Trails team are expert travel planners with extensive knowledge and experience of the American West. When they put a trip package together, they don't just combine a series of canned itinerary items. They plan personal, individualized trips- down to creating unique, hand-traced maps and driving instructions and setting clients up with personal outfitters and guides.

The folks at Newfangled created a new website that is a huge step up from our previous one. The new look and functionality has resulted in significantly more traffic and a growth in business! With Newfangled as integral marketing partner, we know that we'll be able to grow much faster in the future.
Dan Wulfman, Founder, Tracks & Trails

In addition to creating an online presence that would enable them to market their unique trip-planning approach to a wider audience, Tracks & Trails also wanted to translate their vast geographic knowledge into an easily searchable, online tourism resource. One of the major factors in their decision to work with us was Creative Director Justin Kerr's own western-US RV travel history. It was their hope that his real world experience with their industry would enable him to create the right online design for them. With that in mind, we decided to assemble the rest of the team accordingly. Managing the project was Jason Adams, the son of a National Park Interpreter, who grew up in Yosemite National Park. Jim Hendrickson, our developer, is an amateur astronomer and has taken many stargazing trips out west.

Planning and Prototyping

As with any Newfangled project, we began with ample time set aside for planning and prototyping. Our project management team, Jason and Sarah Dooley, needed to get to almost a point of mind meld with Tracks & Trails founder Dan Wulfman and General Manager Michael Salogga in order to ensure that the prototype clearly indicated the goals of the project- a simplified information architecture enhanced by a powerful "Trip Finder" search and filter- without extending beyond the scope and timeline agreed upon by everyone. We settled on building two systems by which users can find trip entries: a visual Google map enabled interface that displays entries by location, and a search tool that allows users to filter trip entries by region, duration, season and even mode of transportation.

Particularly when planning for search functionality, our team needs to fully understand every parameter and relationship among the information involved and the priority with which the client orders that information in order to ensure that the resulting tool is actually helpful to the user. Our prototyping approach allowed the entire team to go beyond planning the information architecture of various screens in the Tracks & Trails search process, and actually create a functional example of what the experience of using the tool will be like.

Design

While Jason and Sarah led the client through planning and prototyping, Justin began guiding the team through the design process. We start most design projects with mood boards, which we use to establish the aesthetic direction of the site up-front without negatively impacting the flow or structure of the site. Rather than depicting functional layout attributes like content areas and navigation menu, the mood boards focus on the branding, design components, typography, imagery, and color palettes that will be incorporated in the final design to come.

Because this process deals with look and feel more than specific layouts, it can run concurrently with prototyping and enables the entire team to benefit from maintaining steady forward momentum. After the Tracks & Trails team quickly and enthusiastically selected one of Justin's concepts, he was able to work from the prototype to create individual layouts for the final design. The entire team was thrilled with the way the design seamlessly integrated photography that captures the grandeur of the western landscape with the bright, friendly, and utilitarian aesthetic of outdoor travel gear, apparel, and signage.

Technology

The basic technology behind this project was no different than any other Newfangled project: a PHP database-driven site build around the core kernel of our Newfangled website management system. On top of this standard foundation, and using the prototype as a functional spec, Jim developed many custom applications, including the Trip Finder search tool and filter, integration with Google's map API, and a custom blogging engine. With a site like this one, which is expected to grow significantly with regularly added new database entries, creating an efficiently architected and scalable database structure at the outset was critical. Jim created a system that handles complex data-set management with ease, which makes adding new content light on site resources and simple for the client.