What's a good way to let users manually switch between inbound and outbound travel content?

Question

Working on the UX for a inbound/outbound switch for a travel website that does tours in the Asia region. They aim to 1st identify using IP address if the user is from the host country or heading to the host country in order to populate offers based on this.

This is crucial as the offers for locals in Hong Kong are out of Hong Kong at other destinations while tourists traveling there would be interested in offers within Hong Kong. Basically showing both inbound and outbound together isn't an option

Besides this they do need a manual switch. I've done rough mash up. My question is, does this solution make a good experience or could you suggest a better solution?

Answer 1

I guess it makes sense to get the location to populate the offers but that should happen while the url request is sent to the server. I don't think you need to worry about that.

But once the user is in the site, I see very little value in pre-populating the source and/or destination using the IP information. Simply have a thumbnail-grid of the most popular cities/places and have a dropdown/combo-box to let them pick from all the available places.

The pop-up that you have is intrusive in nature and is a bit confusing. What if I am in Hong Kong but I am not looking to travel from there? And as I am already there, it won't be my destination. Yes, you could add a "skip" option but again, it adds a step that isn't really necessary. Showing options in boolean is a bad practice if there are other possibilities

Answer 2

Most sites simply use IP location.

Once the page is loaded there's an option to change country and/or language:

• Lonely Planet has choose country and language

• Discover Hong Kong has choose language

Dimming the screen and forcing the choice in order to move forward is obtrusive and probably unnecessary, the simple mock-up you used for an example doesn't look sophisticated either (but I understand it's just an example).

Just load fast, display the grandeur, and work - that's all the site has to do. If the user wants to adjust the language or country there should be obvious little buttons that are easy to locate.

Interrupting to ask something that you already know seems unnecessary, the page should load (in your case, with ADs that are a seamless part of the webpage) quickly and be correct for the reader; but making adjustments still possible, and easy to do.

If they are in Hong Kong they are outbound, unless you are offering 'Island Tours' by air (which applies to either), and outside of Hong Kong they are inbound. It's not clear why you need to ask but VPNs can be accommodated by the country chooser.

Answer 3

The IP address does not provide an information about the users intention. A user traveling to Hong Kong might use the site before traveling there or after arriving at the destination. I suppose that's the reason for the inbound/outbound switch. But what if the user is outside Asia?

About the pop-up I agree with the others, it is intrusive.

But still, the user needs to have a possibility to make her intention clear. Not knowing exactly the content of the service, I suppose the only having the option outbound / inbound is not sufficient in all cases.

I can see two reasons for a user to visit your service:

• get inspiration on where to travel
• get offers on a destination where the user is traveling to

Since you don't know from the actuall location if a user is visiting or living in the place where the site is viewed. Therefor probably the offers should be from the actual location AND from other locations. Maybe a first row is somthing like "What we offer in Hong Kong" and after that "What we offer in other places"

In the first viewport, there should be a possibilty to select a destination (Country / Region or even City, depending on the kind of offers). You could be thinking about how to present this selection, should it be a map, a list or something different?

This way you provide relevant offers without forcing the user to make decisions but provide the user with the possibility to change the offers listing as wanted.