Travel Classes are usually deemed important for customer segmentation of revenue in the airline industry, and Thomas Cook Airlines were no exception. The existing Classes and Fares pages that I was tasked to redesign, suffered from a number of problems, which the initial heuristic analysis uncovered:
- pages were lacking a consistent structure
- there was a sub-navigation on some (!) of them
- one page (Flex Fare) could only be accessed via the top menu, even though it was mentioned in other pages
- Copy was convoluted and content was confusing in places
The initial analysis resulted in a number of goals:
- Gather business requirements and prioritise content
- Focus on one of the classes (PLUS) in the research, to uncover its potential success with customers
- Get users’ feedback on the page, on its preferred structure, content and design
- Work with copywriters on improving the copy
- Research the competition, perform a landscape analysis
- Present the design plan according to the research; approve it with stakeholders and plan the execution with all relevant departments
Defining the problem
As with any project that comes without a clear brief, I started by working with the Product Owner on anchoring the goals (per above), defining the scope and the roadmap. This was also an opportunity for 2 other projects we had initiated simultaneously to be incorporated and tested. Those were:
1. The new design system (new UI language)
2. The new headless CMS (Kentico) we were transitioning to
So, we’ve agreed to tackle the problem of the unclear and complicated presentation of content (UX), while testing design directions for our new visual language (UI) and working closely with developers to ensure the new structure can be efficiently built as components in the new CMS.
Discovery phase
My plan for research focused on 3 main channels:
1. Current features of each class, with emphasis on Eco PLUS, as the business was unsure about it (the method I chose was a remote card sorting exercise with 50+ participants)
2. Gathering internal feedback from Management, Product, Development and Marketing, incorporating all in a new flow of wireframes, to be tested with real people (the method: guerilla testing in a library)
3. Collaborating with a UI Designer on the cosmetic layer to the wireframes, to be tested as well (the method: guerilla testing)
In parallel to the research insights that propelled us forward, I was making sure I document and share as much additional user data as possible, be that regarding demographics (to feed into our personas) or their preference of other airline businesses (competition).
Being aware of the problematic terminology the industry used, I put extra emphasis on uncovering the “human” language the people preferred, while testing face-to-face. This helped me convince Product to start changing the way we communicate information (e.g. “long-haul”, “short-haul” were changed to “over 7 hours”, “7 hours or under”; dimensions were added to baggage; sections were visually separated for clarity, etc.)
Design phase
While wireframing, I kept the two main goals in mind - consistency and clarity. Fortunately, this aligned with all internal feedback the departments left on each design iteration I put on the wall for them to see. The successful design we’ve agreed on meant customers could easily find what they’re looking for (regardless of their journey) and the information would not be partial and would make sense to them.
There was a sense of a greater responsibility working on this, since these pages were agreed to be the basis for:
- structure of all informative pages of the site
- the new design system
- the way we’d build components for the new CMS
After tweaking the UI according to the internal feedback, and taking the 3 versions of designs to people to test (both on desktop and mobile), we’ve come up with a clear winner that had an internal consensus with all the relevant departments as well.
Summary
This project was a good example of just how much clarity UX planning can bring into the business. A haphazard brief and lack of goals and success metrics meant it was up to UX to define the problem and uncover the benefits to the business, to plan, test and execute the improvements, and to collaborate with other departments, sharing data and gaining their requirements - all within a tight deadline.
As we got closer to the handover to development, I was particularly happy that the business understood that its needs here aligned with the customers’ needs.
