Ydeals is a website designed to help you find flight deals. Online travel industry has evolved and become increasingly competitive over the last decade.  As a result, there are many challenges as well as opportunities in the space. Available data shows that ...

...66% of all sales  in tourism are made online and the market size is expected to reach 690 billion by 2026.

Currently the Ydeals website offers lacklustre experience and looks outdated in comparison to the competitors. I set out to rethink existing design by applying user centric principles backed by research data.

The goal is to rethink existing design to drive traffic and engagement.

As I was working through the project I relied on the design thinking process. It wasn’t a linear process because I had to revisit my assumptions as I learned more about the experience of users.

I started my research from sharing the website with 4 participants and asked them to perform a list of typical tasks. My goal was to observe and collect feedback on their interactions with the website. Collected data helped me to empathize with the users and identify common usability problems.

Based on the insights that I gathered from the interviews,  I was able to visualize the pain points that users experience when interacting with the website.

The online travel industry is very saturated and I wanted to explore design solutions that already exist.  It was helpful to learn that all major platforms such as Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Skyscanner, Booking.com share similar features. These discoveries informed my further design direction.

I then experimented with different design ideas. I’ve started from a hand sketching exploration which led me to the low and high fidelity designs.

Originally I considered the tile grid layout as the main design direction. However, the feedback showed that most users think it was too busy. The change improves page layout and usability.

At this stage of high fidelity testing I discovered that initially selected colors didn’t meet contrast ratio requirements.  The new palette was chosen to enhance contrast, which leads for better readability.

The new website follows visual design principles and offers key features that solve the pain points that we uncovered earlier in the research phase.

The updated layout features a new search section and personalization.

Keeping in mind that mobile devices account for almost 60% of the global internet traffic, the new design is responsive to the screen size. The final design also passes AA standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Informed by the visual design principles, the new platform delivers well rounded experience that drives engagement and usability.

Overall, I’m really happy with the final product because I was able to uncover and address users pain points. I remained focused on following the user centric process from start to finish of the project.
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I learned that there is no perfect solution to every problem. However, it was helpful to discover that there were existing standards in the industry. This offered me a good baseline in the beginning of the design process. However, while working towards a final solution, I had to complete numerous revisions uncovered through usability testing.

If I get another chance to work on this project, I would like to access the website performance data.  I think that data on traffic, click through rate and users footprint would offer valuable insights and could be beneficial for the design process. If I had more time and resources for working on the project, I would consider designing a mobile app in addition to the responsive web design.


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