Background

When the user lands on the product listing,the search is not inspirational, its feels robotic, the current filter is based on a set of tick boxes which produces search listings dependent on the tick box selected.

Business Goals

The main business gold is to improve the holiday search which will help to increase enquiries.

My Goal

Creating a more engaging, appealing, holiday search which is more user friendly.

My Role

UX, UI & Visual Designer

03

The Challenge

I encountered 2 obstacles:
• How to make tick boxes attractive and exciting.
• The main issue I faced was that the API was not producing relevant products for all the case scenarios.

04

Ideas

I looked at different options, one of which was the used of clickable polaroids images of destinations to which users wanted to travel and would then indicates the type of holiday they wanted (ski, beach, city break...).

Another idea was of slideshow with NEXT button. We picked-up this concept from a retail website. However we thought, although exciting and inspirational, the process was too long-winded for the user.

The less exciting idea was the used of drop down menus.

Finally,I also have the idea of using tags, were the user had free will to design their own holiday. The user would insert tags into a field under the questions 'where do you want to go?' and 'what do you want to do?'.
While the algorithm in the back-end would then suggest results based on that search.

05

The Lab User Testing

When we presented the different concepts to our users they gave us the following insights:
• The downside of this designed was that the page was very long and the users felt they were not going anywhere soon enough.They founded irritating to have to click on a button to get to another page just to get their results.
• The NEXT slider based concept worked very well with users but they mentioned it took too long to produce results.
• The users did not feel that the drops downs were very inspirational.
• The successful feature that worked best, for four out of five users, was the used of tags which those surveyed felt was more natural.

Flight Centre Booking System Desktop graphic

Search Functionality process

“I suggested naming the feature 'holiday planner.”

06

The Solution

• To move away from the robotic appearance of tick boxes, I suggested naming the feature 'holiday planner'. Rather than tick boxes headings naming destinations and holiday types, we would ask ‘Where you want to go?’ and ‘What you want to do?’
• The UX team suggested to developers that the products should be in syncronised with the search, so that the user felt that their search was producing products which they could see at a glance.
• The results improved when we finally had 800 products on the site.

07

The Product Design

The before and after product design of the holiday filter

Final Design Product Detail Journey Holidays

08

Measuring Success

With the help of Google Analytics we become aware a very significant traffic on the product listings and product pages. We looked at session cam to see if the users were struggling but we could not detect any issues.

HOLIDAY PLANNER