Product story: Blueway

Blueway is an award-winning product for companies in boat holiday business.

Client: Blueway

Blueway is a Turkish start-up working on smart cloud services to help boat holiday companies. They are located at the most popular holiday place, Bodrum and have strong relations with the thousands of local business owners.


The industry has two parties:

  • Travel agencies must have last-minute pricing and booking availability.

  • On the other hand, boat owners should be able to display their boats with all the details required to book a slot.

Product Goals

Travel agencies will be able to sell more reservations as they can browse prices and dates with ease.

Boat owners will achieve a better booking rate during the holiday season. Plus, thanks to an intelligent product, they can receive bookings even after the summertime.

We’ve been asked to design a SaaS platform to make boat holidays more efficient and profitable for all the players in the business.

The product offers a mobile app that gathers all the boats ready to sail with details like the number of cabins, staff, a digital showroom, and daily pricing info.

Discovery first

First, we have conducted interviews and Q&A sessions with boat owners and travel agencies to understand how the blue voyage business works.

Thanks the startup’s local contacts in famous coastal towns, we managed to speak with over 20 different business owners. As a result of the discovery sessions, we reached a detailed perspective on the business.

Based on this, we created the essentials for the product, like persona cards, user journeys, and early sketches.

While working on the product, the Turkish Chamber of Shipping announced a nation-wide tech competition, 'calling for brand-new digital products' for the industry. Blueway put their application with its in-progress product and business plan.

Wireframing

After the initial sketches are completed, we have decided to continue with web product’s wireframes. The user interviews revealed that travel agencies prefer desktop/web use more than mobile.

Focus points were user sign-up and the four main features of the product which eventually ended up in the wireframes and user-testings.

User Interface / Hand-off

Two sets of interface designs were run for Web portal and mobile application.


Mobile designs came after the successful web launch.

All designs are prepared on Figma with a brand new pattern library crafted for Blueway.

Finally!

Blueway was awarded the first prize in the 2020 Project Contest held by the Turkish Chamber of Shipping. As of today, it accommodates over 200 boats and counting.

In the long run, Blueway's goal is to turn the current offline booking experience into a completely digital one with many data-related advantages for boat owners and travel agencies.