NB: This is a guest article by Wouter Blok, chief marketing officer for Easytobook.
To appeal to today’s traveler, aggressive search engine advertising and distracting display ads are not enough.
Search engine optimization will always be important, yet the customer is not looking for a dinosaur hotel directory to guide him to the hotel of his choice.
“I clicked, I puked, I left”: high bounce rates and meager margins demonstrate the end of an era. The ball is in the customer’s court now.
Customer experience and interaction is usually optimized by AB testing, where incremental changes are the steps taken through the optimization process. For mayor OTAs this is their daily cup of tea and heads would roll if you’d propose a total redesign.
But – BUT – what if you would take the website redesign process in a more intuitive direction, where technology meets emotional buying factors?
It would mark a break-away from the conventional evolutionary design in which the only effective route to successful website design is pixel optimization via rigorous testing.
Evolutionary design is a combination of website tests (AB or multivariate) on design, usability and content to increase conversion rate.
Whilst the stats are there to back up this development, the incremental nature of these changes often disrupts the overall consistency of the website and hence lowers the quality of customer experience.
Secondly, with many changes made continuously (multivariate testing), you need a big amount of data to really rely on the effect of each one of the changes on the end goal. Not an easy task.
In contrast, revolutionary design overthrows the old design upon going live. This technique is avoided by many organizations, for fear of unleashing too great a level of change on users, and thus creating backlash. A proper user-centered design process can circumvent the risks by involving users (including your own staff) through:
- Interviews: 1 on 1 feedback from your target audience on your site and your competitors’.
- User testing by eye-tracking research or set up an online user test.
- Feedback on mock ups using online tools like Usabilla and VerifyApp.
- The use of Facebook to invite your advocates for input, testing and to fine-tune the finished product.
- Private beta tests with frontline staff, like the reservation agents.
With a proper feedback loop, the intuitive approach isn’t groping blindly in the dark. The aim is to understand and deliver exactly what the customer wants, when they want it and how they want it.
The customer is in the driving seat, deciding which content they want access to, and even for what reasons. The “one size fits all” approach can bear up in the short term, but if it’s progress you want to see, content and usability simply have to become much more adaptable.
Technique should follow customer demand – and it actually can now. More and more responsiveness to customers’ individual needswill turn into an important competitive advantage.
With regards to radical transformations, Kayak rolled out a new revolutionary design at the beginning of this year. Its aim was to “introduce a universal color palette, simplify logos and typefaces, and incorporate more white space, all for a cleaner, more user-friendly experience”, as its CTO Paul English put it.
For very similar reasons, Easytobook put live a complete redesign this week, avoiding the AB testing route.
The company believes that by putting the customer central, this will lead to a long term relationship with the guest, rather than cluttering the user interface with a plethora of isolated segment optimized tests.
The process in reaching their new design involved a combination of the points mentioned above. A web performance scan was made by WUA, which tests concepts and live sites on target audiences.
Also the competition were checked to distill pain points, as well as gain points. From here the creative process of mood boarding and sculpting mock ups started.
The mock ups were shared through Usabilla and other tools to gather feedback from specialists, as well as Facebook fans. The fully functional test were tested via Usertesting.com and internally on the customer support agents.
Finally the new design went live internally weeks before the official release, with the agents performing bookings on it all day.
It helped solve all those minor bugs that can be so disturbing in a new website.
Old versus new
In the city page comparison below (old vs new), you see how the elastic site adapts to each screen setting. All superfluous information has been cleaned up to leave full space for the search and the upgraded images.
The new logo matches with mother company Travix and is clear about what the service delivers. Furthermore, it scales easily to smaller sizes for buttons on, for example, metasearchers.
Old:
New:
In the hotel page the tab structure has been replaced by a one-page navigation to map, reviews, images or description. This enhances the positional awareness of the user.
Old:
New:
The search result page shows fewer rooms and more images per hotel. This way more hotels can be seen in a single screen. User feedback revealed that price boxes were preferred over a slider.
Old:
New:
The result of all this “de-cluttering” is a more open, aesthetically pleasing and coherent portal. The new design includes the presentation of larger, higher quality photographs of cities, attractions and accommodations.
The booking process is made easier, thanks to clearer buttons and guidance, and additional interactive functionality has been added to the ‘hotel location’ section.
It’s a game of going back to the bare essentials, cutting through clutter and designing with more white space. Results since we went live at 6.30am one morning this week look promising.
Please accept this as an invitation to publicly take a swing at it.
NB: This is a guest article by Wouter Blok, chief marketing officer for EasyToBook.
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About Special Nodes
just a comment from a “user” that surfs on the subject of tourism: I hate and do leave immediately websites that ask me for my travelling dates before I can see the destination, hotels etc. Maybe I function the other way round in that I that I am looking to find a desirable destination and then I will, eventually, look for possible dates in my agenda. What about a button “don’t know my travelling dates, yet”
And: I quite liked the old design….maybe because I do not like forms to block out beautiful fotographs
Kind regards, Bernhard
Wouter, thanks for sharing your process, there are some great pieces of advice there.
I personally think that the new homepage is terrific, and that the detailed work in the design of the city/hotel page is where the magic really is. Great work!
Nice article but a bit disappointing that the site has many display flaws on my iPad. I can’t believe it was tested on one.
Cheers,
Peter
@Bernard Thank you for your feedback, you can search dateless, just don’t enter dates. I do think it’s handy to be able to strike them out again and will bubble this existing request up in the list. An option to hide the search box will probably not make the cur, sorry.
@Oz Thank you for the compliment, our team likes to read this feedback from the industry after working for months on this behemoth of a project.
@Peter Point taken, we’re releasing twice a day now fixing stuff like this. iPad is a fairly small percentage of traffic, which is why it did not have highest prio on hitting the launch date. No excuse of course, in weeks it will be as slick as on desktops. Thank you.
I have to ask why you didn’t AB test old v new? Allowing you to see if new version holds up to conversion rates of old without committing all your traffic to it and eliminating any seasonality issues.
If it turns out your conversion rate drops by 50% on the new version (even though it is more pleasing to the eye), it’s going to be a bit of a roll-back?
Fantastic overview Wouter – thanks for sharing…
…speaking of sharing: how have initial results performed post-launch against your KPIs? Granted, it just went live, but any high level data that can be shared?
thanks for this smart post; i agree the effect of over A/B testing (consitency loss) and with the process that you suggest; i also like usabilla. what tools do you use for the step 2 : “User testing by eye-tracking research or set up an online user test” ?
Hi Wouter,
Great article, really liked it! Very practical indeed…
I’m very curious about the performance improvements of the new site. Do you already see if more people dive deeper into the funnel/ are more likely to perform a search?
Cheers, Geoffrey
We’re responsible professionals and we do the right things. The results so far confirm this.
@Agiled usertesting.com is a great tool! Eyetracking I’d advise you to search for a local party with this equipment set up.
@Pete @Geoffrey I’ll tell you guys over a beer.
good article. I think you need a combination of AB technical testing, user testing and also good old fashioned gutt feeling!!
We are in the process of tweaking our search results, im pretty confident I know the areas that need to be worked on. Having said that I love the Usertesting.com site, I just set up a testing review with them.
I like your new design, although the search is a bit hit and miss. But thats the trade off, we have drop downs which are a pain, but a lot of people like them as well.
Good luck with the new site and hope bookings soar!
@Chris Clarkson: I believe Wouter was talking about the classical A/B tests being avoided. I.e: small evolutionary changes to which performance-changes can be attributed. Obviously, with a radical new design, performance changes can’t be attributed to a single small change anymore.
Having said that, I have no doubt that Wouter and his team are measuring and relating old vs. new all day and night
Congrats on the redesign, looking fresh!
Great article and I love the questions and feedback it ignited.
We do A/B test, we track eyeballs, we develop intuitively, we use “Pretotyping”. On top of that we recently signed up with TeaLeaf. Quite an investment, but worth giving it a good look.
@Chris Clarkson in addition to Geert-Jan Brits, we did elaborate testing of the new design with our reservations department. This provided us feedback that further optimized the design and left minimal to chance.
Thank you all for the enthusiastic responses!
@Ciaran Absolutely, from this point we can go back to AB and MVT! Looking forward!
@Hedwig Sounds great, Tealeaf will certainly give you new insights. Hope to read or hear a case from you about this soon?
I suppose there is no point in A/B or MVT when its a white label of Booking.com and they have done all the testing and usability prior to the white label being built.
looks clean though.
@bob – i think you might be wrong on that about the white label. Do you have experience of Booking.com white labels then? Or others?
@ Bob Thank you for the compliment. I bet they wish we were!
A keen eye will show the differences between easyjet whitelabel and Booking’s own site. Same content, different usability. Also, you will find our site is nothing like these…
The evolution of your design follows the evolution of the web. Gone are the days when text had to dominate and your new designs subconsciously reflect this. With little time to grab attention, using great images to capture the client distinctly outwieghs the use of text and also helps to build your brand.
I also think that your process of actually contacting and asking existing and potential clients their views is extremely important in terms of developing the site. Many web designers build a site that they like the look of without actually putting themselves in the place of a client and asking the question, what do my clients want to see?
Thanks for this Wouter. I’m currently in the process of creating a travel gateway and this really helped!
Hi Sebastian,
Thank you for your message, it is really nice to hear that this piece is inspiring and helping for the industry.
Cheers,
Wouter.