Mr&Mrs Smith // Experience Pages
Mr&Mrs Smith having previously been an online luxury hotel and villa club recently added holiday experiences (day-trips, excursions and cultural experiences) to their offering. Initial and uptake was lower than expected given that they already know their customers like to book these experiences. They believed usability issues on their website were preventing customers from purchasing these experiences from the Mr&Mrs Smith site directly. They asked us the uncover and provide suggestions for solutions they could pursue.
I was A UX DESIGNER IN A TEAM OF 4 UX DESIGNERS.
This was a live brief we were given on a UX course I completed. We worked in an agile way, and shared all responsibilities equally.
WHAT CAME OUT OF USER RESEARCH
We interviewed 11 users, and after sifting through all the feedback we decided to focus on creating solutions to two of the top ten problems that came earlier on in the user journey:
People can’t find/understand/use the search bar – The wording on the search bar was all about hotels and villas so it was unclear you could search for anything else.
People missed filtering options – When users got their search results they weren’t able to filter out unsuitable results and disliked the amount of scrolling they had to do.
IMPROVING THE SEARCH BAR
We changed the wording to make the search bar less centred around hotels by changing ‘Search for your perfect hotel or villa…’ to ‘Where would you like to go?’. We also replaced ‘Check In/Check Out’ with ‘From/To’ in order to distance ourselves from the hotel specific language.
“The search bar was intuitive and easy to use.”
ADDING SEARCH FILTERS
We added various search filters to remove unnecessary scrolling.
“Filtering was useful, being able to filter by type of activity, time of day, price and duration.”
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS
We presented our tried and tested suggestions for improving the search bar and search results pages and Mr&Mrs Smith are now keen to implement them. We also suggestions from our research to further to improve the user journey when booking experiences by adding an option to book online as currently you can only do it over the phone. We were able to show them that multiple of the users in our testing had commented having to book over the phone was seen as time-consuming and off putting.