I created a new booking journey for an established travel agency that specialises in beach package holidays.
The challenge
The travel agency catered mainly for package holidays. Their website would only present available holiday packages and customers were still asked to telephone to place the booking. I was asked to create a booking journey that would in keeping with the way they presented information to their customers and would result in the customer booking a holiday online.
Research
I discussed with key stakeholders their needs from a business and user perspective. After I understood the requirements, I conducted research into the booking journey of similar travel agencies, such as Kuoni, Expedia and Booking.com to understand how they had approached their booking journeys.
I recognised some of my client’s requirements were different to other similar agencies. For example, the start of our booking journey could begin by selecting the type of holiday package desired, as opposed to always selecting a destination and then the packages available.
I applied my knowledge of UX Design and my prior experience working on complex booking journeys with EasyJet, to ensure an appropriate and complete user journey.
User Journey and Process Flows
I mapped out the main process flow for the Booking journey and the screens that would be required.
Wireframes and Prototypes
I mapped out the main process flow for the Booking journey, produced draft wireframes of each screen, including where there were any pop-up dialog boxes, tab behaviour, menu behaviour and alert messages.
After producing the desktop screens, I then also produced the mobile page designs.
Unexpected Challenges
Brand Guidelines Clarification:
I was initially given some brand guidelines and advised I could utilise any of these as part of my designs. However after creating the designs, I was advised that some colours were actually for their premium travel packages. This meant going back to chanel all the pages for this booking journey. Fortunately because I had set up a framework in Figma it was not that difficult to change each page to the more standard brand guidelines. The lesson from this was to ensure there was no ambiguity about what colours were to be used from given brand guidelines and to make it clear in the brand guideline’s going forward.
Stakeholder Changing Decisions:
I also found that stakeholders sometimes put forward modifications and additions to the designs that I was then asked soon afterwards to reverse the changes later on. Sometimes there may have been technical or cost limitations. I realised it was important to produce basic mock ups of the proposals so the client can consider the amended design, but to only complete the changes to designs when the proposals had been properly confirmed from different perspectives.