If only I could create the perfect travel website (2008)

20 secs

Hi. I’m from Designate. Designate’s a communications agency which
delivers strategy, creative, marketing, and technology services to clients in
travel, leisure and finance sectors. One of the things we do is make
Websites. We won the Travoluton “Best Website Design” award last year for
Wales in Style.

1

1 min

Here’s my list - from user perspective - of what I’d like to see in a travel
Website. I won’t talk through this slide in detail as there’s lots to cover in this
presentation.

2

20 secs

Sorry to let you all down, but there’s no silver bullet at the current time.
Things are really quite exciting at the moment. Technologies opening up new
opportunities, but at the same time technology can hinder.

3

30 secs

OTAs who are aggregating a lot of content have the toughest job. Although
they are catching up, with new functionality being added to travel systems
inventory. The closer you are to your inventory in the value chain, the more
control, of course you can exercise, so I don’t envy the big companies’
challenges.

4

30 secs

Here’s a running order of what I want to cover. I’m going to make clear that
this isn’t going to be a thorough exposition of how to optimise a booking
process on a Website. To do that we need more time and you’d have to cross
my palm with silver.

Today I’m mainly interested with how a Website sells and performs.

5

1 min

Here’s an example of the conventions which most online travel agent sites
employ – and I appreciate that the travel sector isn’t restricted just to OTA’s.
Most of the conventions should be pretty clear and most people here will be
familiar with them. They also tend to live in similar places on most Websites,
although the search tool does jump around.

The main issue here is that the search function is often the thing that lets sites
down. I have couple of examples of this later. The “Hero shot” / deal panel
at the top (like the other photography) is suitably dynamic and stylised,
suggesting the company understands the audience – sporty, younger.

Overall this Website’s pretty good and does it’s job well, with the proposition
clear: price and choice. Although it could with do some clear anchoring text at
the head of page. I’ll come back to more examples which don’t perform as
well later.

7

40 secs

I’ll provide limited apologies for the lack of usability in this slide as behind the
scenes it can be more complicated than on the surface.

Content is what sells your holidays and it’s challenging to merge other types
of content (guides, reviews, multimedia, weather) together with inventory in a
meaningful way – a way which makes people want to use the holidays. Good
information design can help, but you still need to get over the hurdle of
integrating data from different sources – often with different data structures
and formats.

That’s enough of this complicated slide.

8

1 min

These are the main issues a generic traveller and an e-commerce director will
want to cover.

But there’s one thing missing we’ve commissioned independent research
which shows that TRUST is the overriding factor when making a travel
booking online.

9

1.30 mins

For all people, travel is a considered purchase, from discretionary income and
people have different considerations.
Career motivated or business travellers value efficiency, control, the ability
to compare/contrast results and details. Slow-to-load Web sites, sites that
have elaborate Flash-based intro screens, and sites that don't provide
detailed information are almost guaranteed to lose this critical segment of
travelers.
Entertainment Motivated travellers value Social computing tools, audio,
video, color, etc. all matter. This group is also highly impulsive, and excellent
target for last-minute offers and cross-selling. Holidays are about personal
identity, People collect “experiences” – and can very much be “vanity
purchases” The good experience should start during the planning or they’ll
switch off. These people really are brand fickle
For Family motivated travellers Personal online safety is very important to
this group; your privacy policy and tools to ensure secure online transaction
will resonate. They’re also more discretionary with their disposable income.
When designing a WEBSITE YOU NEED A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF
WHO YOU’RE DESIGNING FOR – AND SHOULD IDEALLY FACTOR
THIS INTO USABILITY PLANNING BY developing PEN Portrtaits or
PERSONAS of the people you want to communicate with.

11

20 secs
PEOPLE WILL BE READING THE BBC WEBSITE THEN USING YOURS.
THEY HAVE A HUGE EXPECTATION. YOU HAVE TO THINK MORE LIKE
A MEDIA OWNER – and THIS MEANS HIGH PRODUCTION VALUES.

12

20 secs
And what do people like doing most when they’re not travelling? Researching
it online. In term of online purchase intent, travel is secondary only to book
purchasing.

13

40 secs

Lookers and bookers are those people who research and book their travel
online, as defined in the previous slide
They’re YOUNGER;
They’re BETTER EDUCATION (so you need to sell in a sophisticated way)
And they have a HIGHER INCOME – so there’s more opportunity to
differentiate on more than price alone

14

2 mins

When they’re in planning mode, they’re looking for inspiration, but the customer journey is fragmented
and nebulous; with numerous research “tools” available and people can tap into the “wisdom of crowds”.
Thinking and planning time is being stretched and fragmenting BUT impulse purchases are available
immediately.

According to Research conducted by Google. Consumers Take nearly a month to go from first search to
purchase of a travel product”; They make make 12 searches and visit 23 websites, and they visit their
chosen site 3.9 times before making a final booking. And it’s not straightforward - people go through a
process of iterative ideation, which means they’re on “receive mode” for new ideas until they’ve pressed
the submit button. People are becoming much more “brand fickle”

When they’re on location Their not just collecting memories and sending postcards; they’re capturing
multimedia; they’re emailing; they can blog; they can login to their interactive travel itinerary, which
someone like Trip-IT provides (in the US)

When they return home They can be on Facebook updating their “where I’ve been” map; uploading to
YouTube or Flickr; responding to “leave some feedback” email from Expedia, for example. All of these
activities feed the iterative ideation process at the front of the customer journey.

Some travel companies are trying to replicate and copy functionality across the customer journey, and
even integrate social searches and content from third party providers into their inventory.

The perfect Website isn’t one which provides all of this functionality (you’ll never be better than Flickr or
Facebook at social media ), but one which understands people’s needs enough to know where it’s
proposition fits in with the customer journey.

More information can be found about the Google statistics on the Travolution Website.
http://www.travolution.co.uk/Articles/2007/12/11/1186/Google+study+highlights+travel+buyer
+behaviour.html

17

30 secs

CONSIDER REMOVING SLIDE
Note: Travel suppliers should not take their customers for granted; they are
constantly checking to see who has the best option for them. 53% of the
Bookers who research on a travel supplier's site also research on sites
belonging to high-street agencies, and 57% research on OTA sites like
Lastminute.com. All it takes is for someone else to do a better job of engaging
the customer and you've lost them.

19

30 secs

So how do you make yourself perfect, and create a Website that people want
to purchase holidays from? Well you have to think about people’s emotional
and rational practical needs, but what does this mean?

20

1 min

Because the Internet makes price-shopping easier, travel firms must appeal to
travelers' emotions to more fully engage them.

Note: Despite travelers' keen focus on budget, Bookers are more willing to be
persuaded to bend the budget and go to their first-choice destination

21

2 mins
A brand needs to think about it’s position and image in relation to how a user
thinks emotionally about travel and their own personal goals. People need
to be sold to effectively and the good experience should start when a
customer’s researching a holiday – they need inspiration. But many sites are
still not categorising holidays in any other way than beach; cruise; city break;
or ski. This is a combination of the constraints in legacy systems, lack of
understanding of user needs and ineffective selling and categorisation.
People think in different ways about holidays than the way travel companies
sell to them: they want experience. There’s a list of key issues on the bottom
left of the screen which should act as key guidance in assessing how effective
your site is positioning itself.
Everyone’s got a practical side, and people will have a key set of questions
they need to cover before they can get there. This is about fulfilment of the
service starts on the Website, the moment someone’s using it, not when the
sale’s been made. Keep the things on the bottom (and top) right in
It’s worth noting that emotional and rational are NOT mutually exclusive.
Peoples’ rational expectations of a Website may well be not satisfied by a
negative experience with usability or accessibility. For example some sites
search tools won’t work or are frustrating to use – especially if you’re not
using IE on the PC. This is hardly inspirational for anyone buying a holiday
online.
AND DIFFERENT AUDIENCES NEED TO BE SOLD TO IN DIFFERENT
WAYS – AS SHOWN BY PIE CHART ABOUT TRAVELLERS MOTIVATIONS.

22

30 secs

To keep it simple, let’s focus on the proposition and think about the emotional
side of the selling job your site has to do. Remove all the constraints of
legacy systems and usability. It can start as simply as answering these eight
questions. We’ve built successful Websites by starting with these questions.

23

A quick case study here, designed to show how thinking about appealing to
people’s interests can get around the challenges of marketing destinations
alone.

24

20 secs

South West Wales Tourism Partnership came to us with a destination
marketing challenge – how to repackage something which most people in
Britain equated with industrial decline – this is a typical picture of South West
Wales, which sums up it’s image in the public consciousness.

25

30 secs

We created three distinct brands with clear differentiation as shown here.
Each of which acts as a gateway to accommodation and attraction providers.
These are optimised for search around specific keywords which are
experience-driven, NOT around specific destinations.

The sites have been incredibly effective at promoting and bringing in trade to
South West Wales.

We believe this is a “long tail” success story - destination marketing has been
turned on its head

26

30 secs

For those of you in the audience who might have seen the latest
transformation of a British Television institution, this is a very similar leap in
format that some travel Webites really need to start thinking about.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it or haven’t seen it - it’s as simple as
mentioned before: THINK MORE LIKE A MEDIA OWNER IF YOU WANT TO
ENGAGE PEOPLE.

27

1 min (SLIDE NEEDS REWRITING)

Without fail I’ll always recommend to clients that they take a user-centred
design approach. We’re redesigning a financial client’s e-commerce Website
right now using an approach that’s known as user-centred design, with
iterative-prototyping and formal user lab testing. This attaches a £10-15K
premium on the project and 3-4 weeks extra time, but the expected site
efficiency gains we believe will pay back 10:1.

29

1 min

In my preparation for this presentation I looked at
about 30 different Websites. Many of the sites have
clearly been designed for Internet Explorer a don’t
work as well in Firefox (I have a couple of examples
later). Depending on who you choose to believe,
Other browsers, including Firefox can make up
anything from 23 – 40% of the Internet population.
A statistic that no e-commerce director should
ignore. If you don’t design optimally, you’re
hindering the user experience and diminishing your
chance of converting.

YOUR DESIGNERS MUST NOT ASSUME ALL
BROWSERS ARE JAVASCRIPT ENABLED,
EITHER. AROUND 5% of Web users switch off 30
Javascript and so won’t be always able to see your
pages as you designed them.

30 secs
These examples examined along the lines of the basic anatomy lesson
earlier, but also show where usability or selling features could be improved.
I’m only at this stage looking at home pages so you can easily compare and
contrast.

And I apologise to anyone in the audience if you manage these Websites. No
Website is perfect and continuous improvement is always necessary. These
aren’t designed to single anyone out, just to illustrate common issues.

31

1 min

All pieces of the anatomy represented in conventional areas as shown

NEGATIVE - No hero shot: LOST OPPORTUNITY TO REALLY SELL THE
EXPERIENCE WITH CAREFULLY CHOSEN IMAGERY
NEGATIVE – POOR INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE TWELVE ITEMS IN
ONE LIST NEGATIVE – NO ANCHORING STATEMENT
BRAND PROPOSITION: PRICE AND CHOICE

32

1 min
AGAIN, ALL NORMAL CONVENTIONS FEATURED
POSITIVE RSS feeds of deals – becoming increasingly prevalent across all
websites, but the problem is they tend to be basic feeds on the latest deals,
not a customised alert based on user preferences. To be perfect, they would
have to be based on a user profile.
Some nice tools on the right hand side, BUT
NEGATIVE the BENEFITS OF REGISTRATION AREN’T SOLD. WHAT’S IN
IT FOR ME. “Register and get….”
POSITIVE The achievement award on the right hand
NEGATIVE – THIS website is built in HTML tables, which restricts its
accessibility and the ability repurposing the design, across mobile devices, for
example
NEGATIVE – NO BRAND DIFFERENTIATION / NO ANCHORING
STATEMENT –
ASSUME PROPOSITION IS “CHEAP AND CHOICE”

33

30 secs
POSITIVE – neatly laid out
RSS deed
NEGATIVE
No differentiation
No hero shot / promo
No brand positioning
No “contact me”
I’M ASSUMING THE PROPOSITION IS “CHEAP AND CHOICE”

34

30 secs
GOOD, CLEAR LAYOUT, but a shame about the chunk text which could be
broken up. The search tool could be broken up a bit more.
DOESN’T DIFFERENTIATE
CLEAR ABOUT ITS PROPOSITION: CHOICE / PRICE
IN THIS PRICE / CHOICE MARKETPLACE it’s all about the margin - many
OTA’s are using similar inventory, so with search optimisation this site will
perform well for it’s owners as it has good usability features.

35

30 secs

This is not an OTA – actually a direct selling company, so deals not so
prevalent.
Nice clear design.
They should still consider “deals” to entice people.
Proposition could be a little stronger.

36

20 secs

This is a beautiful website which covers all the conventions and sells really
well.

They could make a little more use of the white space on the left though –
that’s some valuable selling space not being used.

37

30 secs

Covers all the main conventions.

Very strong proposition.

38

20 secs

I thought I’d show you some higher-end Websites now. These tend to be
better at selling emotively – usually on a higher ticket / margin but lower
volume. They’re generally closer and more hands on with their inventory as
well, using an approach which could be described as “carefully selected”.

39

1 min

I should declare an interest here. Wales in Style is run by Designate on
behalf of visit Wales. We are about to redesign the Website to include user
generated content functionality and some improved information architecture.
I’ve got a full list of improvements back at the office, but I won’t share them
today.

It’s worth noting that the “quality” end of the market tends not to publish its
phone number of the home page. A “contact” or “feedback” link is the norm.

40

1 min

Excellent strapline
Emotive use of language and imagery
Award - trust
Search by

41

30 secs
•  Imagery – who can’t fail to be inspired by this imagery
•  Good anchoring statement
•  Emotive selling – Valentines’ gift
•  Member benefits suggest premium services
•  Helpful features below the search tool provide extra focus and inspiration
– “IDEAS”
•  NEGATIVE OR POSSIBLY NOT – Email sign up below “the fold”

BLOW UP THE SEARCH INTERFACE

42

30 secs (one more example needed)

Shortlists are the type of functionality which are likely to aid return visits,
increase traffic (especially if they can be shared) and reduce booking
latency – much easier to return and book something if it’s already saved and
I can return.

No perfect travel site should be without a shortlist

44

30 secs – two more examples needed.

Southwest Airline’s DING - $150M of incremental revenue – the next step on
from RSS feeds.

If you’re running a website that’s got an RSS feed, think about how you could
make your customer targeting and offer personalisation better with a gadget
or widget. If you don’t currently have an RSS feed, then think about getting
one of those.

45

30 secs (one more example needed)
Lastminute.com’s ADD TO MY Calendar functionality makes use of a
technology called “HCalendar” my holiday planning really integrated into how I
organise my life. I ordered my holiday on my company laptop, and then
clicked on a link to mark the holiday out in my diary.

Microformats are part of the “Semantic Web”, which is part of the future of
online technology in which more and more information will have relevance to
people, dates, locations, and places and can be integrated more seamlessly
into devices which we use and carry around with us. You can find out more
by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats (although this is
quite technical).

46

I must mention EXPEDIA’s excellent user-generated hotel rating system – it’s
extremely effective and integrates really well with their CRM – a welcome
back email dropped in my inbox at exactly the right time. Not quite perfect, as
it doesn’t show me reviews from people like me, but it’s near perfect.

This shows an example of a hotel I researched and then fed back on, adding
to the wisdom of crowds, Expedia, so excellently employs.

47

Mapping is becoming a richer tool now developers are starting to exploit the
APIs from Google, Microsoft and other mapping providers. In this example
my search results return further points of interest which I can click and explore
which are sorted by categorisation and show the distances from my base
location.

48

30 secs

Calendars are one of my pet hates, and one of the first things which act as a
barrier to people using searches effectively.

The huge pop-up on the left shows a list of dates in August 2009, even
though I’m on a winter sports homepage. I have snowboarded in June
before, but this was in Argentina, not Europe. A piece of functionality known
as calendar control is vital here, but it also needs to be intelligent.

The box on the right shows a flexible search, but it assumes when I’m
choosing to be flexible about my dates, I can take 14 days either way and
nothing else. That’s not very flexible to me – I want to be able to specify to
the exact margin when I’ll be flexible – as it’ll usually be around weekends.

50

20 secs

I visited this Website on February the first to find a search tool which
defaulted to January 08.

51

20 secs – red circle needed

Unsurprisingly it didn’t return any results.

When the search failed – it should have made some recommendations.

52

20 secs
I visited this Website in Internet Explorer 7 to find that it only offered available
dates within the next three weeks.
So I shut down my browser and revisited in Firefox and it offered me none at
all.

53

10

This is a bit more flexible, than the plus or minus 14 days search we saw
before

54

20 secs

But it’s not quite as good as this, which is almost perfect. To make it perfect,
in my opinion I should be able to a different lag at the beginning from the tail
end of a holiday.

55

20 secs

Style error.
Menu doesn’t render properly on Firefox due to a problem with the style sheet
(CSS) - white text on cream background will diminish chances of any booking
being made.

57

30 secs

Technical errror
Errors happen, but all Webservers can be set up to handle errors and show a
friendly page.

This is the equivalent of leaving the phone off the hook and locking the door,
but not leaving any message.

Remember, a traveller will visit 23 Websites along their journey, so if this
happens they might only remember your site as “the one which didn’t work”
“We’re sorry, there seems to be a problem. Please come back in a little
while.” (i.e. we would like your business and we don’t want to scare you off.)

58

30 secs

I don’t know if this is a problem with my PC or the website - many users will
blame your site if it does this, in any case. But be careful where you rely on
multimedia files. There are more robust ways to implement them than done
here.

59

30 secs

No travel Website seems to be able to handle a search which does include
doesn’t include the Airports north of London which I don’t want fly from without
me performing two separate searches on Gatwick and Heathrow. This is a
common issue amongst people like me, who live on the South Coast of
England.

60

20 secs

Submit button hidden

61

10 secs

If you click on the register button without completing the form.

62

20 secs

All Web developers should understand error handling.

63

20 secs

Websites should be simple. BUT if the planning was kept as simple as shown
above nobody would use our Websites.

To make them effective and efficient, we sometimes have to go on a
complicated journey…

65

30 secs

…which requires us to look at how people move through on their “travel
customer journey”, which I demonstrated earlier.

If we’re prepared to get to grips with the underlying complexity of the issues
(which this slide shows), the end result will actually be more simple, and more
effective.

Apologies for this slide by the way.

66

30 secs

A best practice approach to Website design considers a number of issues,
which are shown here. The biggest challenge is making sure we cover all of
the issues above in order, without bypassing and going straight into visual
design. When this happens sites can fail.

67

30 secs

Getting to the end result requires a managed process, with clear stages which
align business needs and user needs and test that these are being met.
As I mentioned before, I always recommend usability testing. When the site
is launched, keep getting feedback, keep testing and keep this fed back into
an ongoing site improvement plan.

68

30 secs

Here’s a quick reminder of some of the key issues which needs to be thought
about when designing a usable Website.

69

1 min

And here’s my final “recipe for creating the perfect travel Website”.

If only it could be this simple.

70

If only I could create the perfect travel website (2008)

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