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.