Tailor-made tours booking process

The redesign of the CTN website was initially driven mostly by the new strategic direction as proposed by Raft Collective. User data was gathered by market research, Hotjar and Google Analytics to understand user journeys on the website and the campaign landing pages. We used A/B testing functionality to test the conversion rates of the different campaign pages.

Competitor research

The key pages in the booking process were determined to be the homepage, the tailor-made tour pages, and the contact form. I started with competitor research to understand the position of Cuba Travel Network in the market and learn from best in class user experiences in the travel sector. In addition, I reviewed consumer trends by analysing several reports about the travel sector. I used a similar approach for all the other product sections, analysing the best in class user experience for booking flights, hotels, cars and excursions.

Design studio for homepage and tailor-made tours

I organised a half-day design studio with the CEO, marketing manager and SEO expert. I presented my insights from the competitor research, and we followed up with a series of brief rounds of sketching allowing everyone to put their ideas on paper. This creative session led to many insights and team consensus on the desired design solutions for the homepage and tailor-made tour pages. In addition, it helped clarify the activities and value of user experience design in the project.

Sketching and wireframes

I further explored the insights from the design studio in several sketches. Staring with sketches prevents becoming too precious about ideas when you are still in an exploratory stage. Once the ideas were more solidified, I created wireframes in Sketch. Because of the limitation of my time, I agreed with the IT team in Havana that I would develop the UX and UI design for the responsive website in two screen sizes (992px and 576px) rather than four.

Tailor-made tour section

The tailor-made tours section received a more prominent position on the homepage, including copy that better explained what CTN provides. I also clarified the services that CTN offers by adding a ‘How does it work’ visual: Step 1. Tell us about your wishes, Step 2. We’ll contact you to talk about trip options, Step 3. We’ll create an itinerary for your trip. Step 4. Satisfied? then you are ready to go! This component was included in the homepage and the Contact us page.

Local expert guides

Local expert guides are the face of CTN in Cuba and they often receive words of gratitude in the Trustpilot reviews. To introduce prospective travellers to these guides,  I added a component in which the local guides could personally introduce themselves via short video bios. In addition, that gives them an opportunity to present the city or region where they work as a guide.

Photography

One of the changes I introduced was a better use of the abundance of colourful and inspiring Cuba photography available. On several pages, I introduced photo galleries and more varied use of hero photography.

Inspiring trust

I wanted to inspire more trust in prospective travellers who were new to CTN. For Dutch travellers affiliation with SGR is important, since they provide financial guarantees in case anything goes wrong. In addition, the Trustilot ratings for CTN were very good. I decided to highlight these logos on pages essential for the booking process, such as homepage and contact form. I also found out that some highly regarded magazines and newspapers such as Vogue and The New York Times had written about CTN and included their logos on key pages.

Booking component

The booking component is a very crucial component as it allows people to search directly for cars, hotels, excursions and flights. I redesigned the booking component, and also the search results and filter options for accommodation, car rental, excursions and flights.

Contact page redesign

The contact page is a crucial touchpoint in the customer journey and our team wanted to improve the conversion on this page. I based my design solution on my previous experience in form design and make grateful use of the best practices from Luke Wroblenski’s bestseller ‘Web Form Design: Filling in the blanks’. His book contains detailed recommendations for form design (label position, size of input fields, use of help text) based on extensive user testing. I also looked at competitors in the travel industry to learn how they designed their forms. And spoke with the CTN customer support team which receives these forms and initiates the first customer contact.
The most important aims were to minimise pain points, by reducing clutter and showing a clear path to completion.  I drastically reduced the length of the form. I allow the aspiring traveller to simply write their travel needs in one go, rather than filling out many fields. The prompts above the field were informed by the needs of the customer support team. To create a feeling of trust the Trustpilot ratings were included on the page, as well as a customer support component. For clarity, I introduced the ‘ How it works’ visual showing prospective travellers what to expect. Recommendations for the future would be to add Live chat as a strategy to boost conversion. I also suggested a customer account page, allowing the customer to build their custom Cuba trip with their personal travel agent and share it with travel companions.

Visual design

We received the source files from the Raft Collective, and I adapted these in Sketch to provide the visual designs for the various new screen designs. In this step, a balance was needed between efficient re-use of the modular design components and allowing for innovation through the introduction of several new components.

Copy

Tailor-made or custom made? Trips, tours or excursions? To avoid confusion for website users I suggested being consistent with other tour operators with our terminology. I researched the terminology used by competitor travel agents and created an excel list of the most relevant copy in English and Dutch and arranged a German translation.

Results and takeaways

I created the user experience redesign and visual design of the entire CTN website. This included the homepage, tour pages and the individual products; booking a flight, car, hotel or excursion. The products included search results, landing pages and detail pages. I also produced several landing pages and whitelabel hotel and car booking websites, The benefit of being responsible for both wireframes and visual design was that I could move forward quickly. As we progressed in this project, the communication and collaboration between the marketing and IT team improved. We established regular meetings and shared goals, and shared our concerns and solutions. As usual, communication was key to making the redesign a success. In addition, doing creative workshops as a team had helped to align our goals, and created a better understanding of the user experience design process.