Irish Ferries - Booking engine
Irish ferries is a long term client of Ebow agency. As part of ongoing improvements to their website they comissioned us to redesign their booking engine. The booking process was very dated, it had numerous usability issues, if solved could improve the conversion rate and the user experience of booking a trip.
Development methodology Waterfall
Team crossfuctional
1 Project manager
3 UX designers including myself
5 Stakeholders on Irish ferries side
Develpment agency based in the UK
Objective.
I was the senior member on the design team and had a good experience with running usability testing and other User-centered design activities. My role was to redesign the booking engine I was responsible for the UX and the UI part. Considering the old booking engine was very out dated it was a great opportunity to deliver a big improvement. Management was keen on launching this at the same time as they would launch their new home page. If we wouldn't redesign this on-time that might jeopardise the launch of the new home page that was tied to a larger overhaul for their entire campaign.
Work.
To kick off this project we carried out a heuristic evaluation of the current state of the booking process along with benchmark analysis. We then ran a small usability testing with other members of the agency and costumers. This allowed us to establish a ‘Current state’ that we were able to start working off. We then went on and created a number of proposed designs that will attempt to solve the key issues.
Some of the key issues we tried to solve:
Basic usability, font size, input colours and strokes
Users also had issue with deciding on the vehicle type; description wasn’t clear.
Overall form length on the home page
Promotion step and cabin selection step were messy and needed to be simplified.
Heuristic evaluation made by our team
Heuristic evaluation made by our team
Heuristic evaluation made by our team
Heuristic evaluation made by our team
Design.
After going through all the activities and establishing the plan we created a series of wireframes and presented them back to the senior management for feedback. After going through 5 rounds of design presentations we got an approval on the new designs. We then went on and ran another usability testing session to iron out final details to make sure we are on the right track. Following this we teamed up with the development team in the UK and collaborated on final stages of the project. The challenging piece was to figure out how to work together as there were so many parties involved on each side. To be effective we have established some ground rules. We had weekly calls for status update and daily calls as needed to ensure that questions are answered in a timely manner. It might sound expected but we ensure that everybody are cc’d on all communication as trivial as it might sound it common for people to drop the ball on certain responses or accidentally replay to 1 person only. Very quickly this can become messy and so communication was one of the key elements that helped quickly progress in the right direction.
Wireframes step 1 sample
Wireframes payment sample
Wireframes Step 1 expanded sample
Project outcomes.
After we launched the new booking engine along with the new home page we seen a gradual uptake of sales through the new engine and a raise in traffic overall to the website. The client was happy overall with the results as we were able to deliver on the KPI’s and that ultimately improved our relationship with the client.
Reflections.
In the scope of this project I had to face some difficult trade-offs due to tight deadlines. While I wasn't happy at the time with making the trade-offs when I seen the end result delivered on time and being able to hit the KPI’s even though we had to de-scope and compromise. In this project I learned the challenges around collaboration with other agencies and the value of open communication channels. If I had to do this all over again I would have got the senior leadership involved for the very beginning to allow time to educate them about a healthy design process as well as reaching out to the remote dev team well in advance to learn about the possible limitations of the back end system to avoid last minute design changes.
Irish Ferries final designs for booking engine
Irish Ferries payment step design
Irish Ferries selecting a trip new booking engine design