Sherpa is an industry leader in travel restrictions and sells eVisa applications as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Over 120+ flight partners look towards Sherpa's solutions, with thousands of users using the webapp at the peak of Covid to determine what documents they need, in order to travel to locations around the world successfully.
Sherpa has multiple products that they offer to partners, some of which include the trip element search, travel restrictions map, travel requirements search, evisa search, and more.
Over the years, these solutions have been designed and redesigned constantly with multiple people and an unfinished design system, leading to a lot of design debt and inconsistencies between dropdowns triggers, containers, input fields, and more.
The task I was given was to identify all the inconsistencies with all components used in these searches, take note of all differences and use cases, and to design one single search to rule them all.
• Having one single search with very similar components will lead to better navigation and discoverability for all users.
• Subtle differences will be necessary depending on the use case and responsive width.
• User testing will be especially necessary to providing a better, convincing, argument for one single search solution.
Many solutions and iterations were designed, using multiple types of dropdown triggers and/or input fields and buttons, but the most widely accepted one was the autofill input search field, where the user would type into the textbox and have a dropdown container pop right under it.
Although it sounds simple, many of the original solutions included dropdown modals, overlapping containers, and many inconsistencies, confusing the user on what to expect when selecting the same trigger but outputting a different solution.
Overall, the solution was successful, backed by a small amount of user tests with higher conversion than the original.
The unified search solution was mainly a success but there were some difficulties in convincing the whole company that this was the best solution.
To combat this, I'd do a more extensive user testing and live A/B testing, releasing the unified search to a small percentage of users and also getting qualitative feedback from partners, to find the solution with the highest conversion rate.
