Saddle Skedaddle

The end of soggy paper maps

Saddle Skedaddle create tailored cycling holidays around the world for everyone from experienced mountain-bikers to novice cyclists. Cyclists can choose from guided holidays or self-guided trips with routes created by the Skedaddle team.

 As the self-guided holidays relied on maps and written instructions, JUMP was commissioned to develop a bespoke Saddle Skedaddle app to bring everything into a more manageable format. Customers now have access to all their holiday details and itineraries as well as online maps and on-route navigation that guide them from their handlebars.

Cycling enthusiasts and holiday-makers

JUMP’s UX team carried out user research to inform the app design and to feed in to the features of the app. Our objective was to understand the common challenges and highlights of customers’ cycling holidays as well as understanding their relationship with the Skedaddle brand. We also wanted to know what sort of people might choose this kind of holiday and how they used technology in their everyday lives.

Our customer interviews allowed us to define the functions that we believed would most support our users, but also highlighted some common concerns which we would need to address during the design and build process.

A personalised customer journey

The app is supported by a complex back-end infrastructure that unites Saddle Skedaddle’s existing holiday system with mapping software, allowing the team to easily create cycling routes for pre-set holidays right down to a bespoke route for an individual customer.

Thorough testing was carried out by our development team (who all suddenly were required to take up cycling) so that we could adjust our approach to the battery usage (a big factor on an 8 hour day of cycling) and refine the effectiveness of the route guidance.

Feedback to date has been extremely positive, with typical customer comments as follows:

“Once we had been helped to master the App we found it the best we have used.”

“The points of interest were fantastic and we were able to stop off and enjoy many places along the way that we never would have found otherwise.”

“We did not really use the maps... the navigation system on the App was pretty much flawless.”