Improving Voyage Discovery in a Constraint-Heavy Travel Platform
Project Overview
At SeaDream Yacht Club, I worked on improving how users discover, evaluate, and shop voyages within an existing travel platform.
Problem
Users browsing through voyages were shown a large volume of options with very limited ability to efficiently narrow or compare them.
Filtering was confusing and allowed users to select combinations that returned no results, creating trial-and-error behavior and frustration. Which led to people leaving the site entirely.
At the same time, the voyage details experience, or clicking into one specific voyage to view, lacked clear hierarchy, making it difficult to quickly understand key information and evaluate what was being offered on that trip.
This created friction across two key moments:
• Discovery - finding relevant voyages
• Evaluation - understanding and comparing options
So many users would not even have the patience to make it to the booking process and leave the site early.
The Challenge
The platform operated within a legacy system, limiting the ability to implement large scale changes.
Rather than redesigning the experience entirely, the challenge was to identify high-impact changes that could improve usability while working within existing technical and organizational constraints.
My Role
My first moves:
• Identify the heavy hitters that convaluted the main user journey the most
• Obvious obstacles that needed immediate redesign were the voyage discovery page, individual voyage page design, and booking
• Proposing interaction and layout improvements within existing constraints
Due to platform limitations and stakeholder constraints, not all necessary designs were implemented, but the work focused on improving key user interactions within the current system.
Designing the Discovery System
With over 200+ voyages to choose from, the challenge was helping users easily find the one that's best for them.
Through Microsoft Clarity analysis and interviews with reservations and the sales teams, I discovered that guests, travel advisors, and internal staff were all trying to accomplish the same goal through different search behaviors.
While guests often browsed by destination or date, advisors and internal teams frequently searched by voyage number, country, port, or a calendar view. The existing experience supported these workflows very poorly and often led users into dead ends through filter combinations that returned zero results.
Restructuring the Information Architecture
I redesigned the discovery system around the user workflows by:
• introducing search by voyage number, country, port, and duration (did not exist prior)
• improving date filtering across multiple months and years
• reorganizing filters into logical categories
• preventing filter combinations that returned no results
Supporting Different Search Behaviors
Research showed there was no single way users searched for voyages. To support multiple workflows, I surfaced frequently used tools directly within the discovery experience, including currency selection, calendar view, sorting by departure date, duration, and price. Some of these options were hidden by "hacks" (like the only way to reach it was to know the url and type it in) or simply hidden deeper in the site.
I created a more flexible system that better supported both customer browsing and advisor-led searches.
Redesigning Voyage Cards
The voyage cards were restructured to improve scanability and comparison by prioritizing key information and introducing map and photo viewing options directly within the browsing experience. Also the voyage number was missing previously, again making users have to hunt it down.
Outcome
Most recommendations were implemented, resulting in a more structured discovery experience that reduced friction and better supported how users actually searched for voyages.
Supporting Decision Making
While improving discovery made it easier for users to find relevant voyages, the singular voyage details pages made it difficult to confidently evaluate and compare options.
Information was dense, inconsistently organized, and lacked clear hierarchy. Key details such as itinerary, duration, and overall value were not clearly prioritized, forcing users to scan large amounts of content to understand what each voyage offered.
Improving Information Hierarchy
I restructured the page to better support how users naturally want to evaluate voyages.
This included:
• organizing content into clearer, defined sections
• create a stronger visual hierarchy to guide scanning
• prioritizing key details such as itinerary, duration, and core highlights
These changes made it easier for users to quickly understand the most important aspects of each voyage without needing to parse through a bunch of unnecessary information.
Supporting Faster Evaluation
The goal was not to reduce information, but to make it more digestible and actionable.
By improving structure and hierarchy, users can:
• identify key differences between voyages more quickly
• understand value without excessive effort
• move from browsing to decision-making with greater confidence
Constraints & Tradeoffs
Rather than redesigning the entire experience, the focus was on identifying high-impact improvements that could work within existing technical and organizational constraints.
This work was completed within a legacy platform that limited the ability to implement large-scale structural changes.
This required prioritizing:
• changes that improved clarity without requiring full system restructuring
• solutions that could integrate with existing components and patterns
• improvements that reduced user friction without adding unnecessary complexity
In some cases, more ideal solutions such as deeper restructuring of navigation or more advanced filtering logic were not feasible within the current ruling.
As a result, the approach focused on improving the most critical parts of the user journey, specifically discovery and evaluation, rather than attempting a full redesign.
Key Takeaways
Targeted changes can significantly improve usability when focused on the right problems.
Prioritizing High-Impact Work
Rather than attempting to address every issue, the focus was on improving the most critical parts of the experience, voyage discovery and evaluation.
This emphasized the importance of identifying where design effort creates the greatest impact.
Structuring for Clarity
Improving both the filtering system and the voyage details experience highlighted the importance of information architecture and hierarchy in supporting user decision making.
Clear structure enables faster understanding and reduces unnecessary friction.
Designing for Real-World Conditions
This work required navigating technical limitations and stakeholder constraints, reinforcing the importance of adapting design decisions to real-world conditions while still improving the overall user experience.