Alexander Stevens
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Discovery UX for luxury holiday company

2020-05-01 — 7 min read
Mockup of laptop with prototype on screen
An Axure prototype was used to test new ideas and concepts

This luxury holiday company wanted to understand the UX improvements needed for their customers before moving to a new platform. Following some initial research we ran a design sprint. Myself and one other designer were responsible for designing and building the prototype. The outcome was a fully tested UX for the key e-commerce screens.

Design Sprint

During the initial design sprint we explored new ideas with customers.

Screenshots of prototype
We rapidly iterated the through multiple ideas throughout a week of intensive user testing sessions.

Prototype walkthrough

This was the final prototype walk-though which had been iterated a few times following usability testing sessions by an external agency.

Findings from Design Sprint

We found through research that the presentation of information heavy screens like the hotel’s facilities could change perceptions. By providing all the rich information people needed behind a set of mosaic photos was more inspirational for our participants - which was more in line with the brand values we wanted to communicate.

Mosaic of images
We found that the use of photography to tell the story of a hotel changed perceptions

Moving up in fidelity

The findings of the research formed the basis of the work needed to move Sovereign onto the new web platform. I was responsible for getting the UX team to complete the prototype as a working specification for our vision for the product.

My designers were responsible for this fully detailed prototype which was created in Axure in order to flesh out the details within the design and provide the development team an opportunity to scope the work. Visual design would be done later.

Fully responsive

The prototype was fully responsive allowing the developers to understand how we believed it might work across different viewpoints

A richer content model

Mockup of prototype on laptop
Facilities displayed as imagery to keep the page inspiring and visually appealing (and letting the photography do the selling) as per the research findings

Holiday package in one place

Mockup of prototype on laptop
Customers do not need to go off and start again if they want to compare and contrast different dates, airports, durations or any of the multiple factors that feed into a holiday package

A richer level of room detail

Again thinking about our users needs and research we use photography of the rooms to do the selling and through interaction provide a level of detail that luxury customers need in order to really understand a hotel

Product learnings

  • Through iteration and a number of user tests we were able to identify key areas where we could improve the UX and move to the new platform with confidence.
  • Photography and imagery were key in giving people an emotional connection with a hotel and provide vital clues to help customers whose a good fit

Personal learnings

Axure is a very powerful prototyping tool but it did struggle with the responsive side of things. We might have been better to product a separate mobile prototype, although this would have created more design overhead.

Working with an external agency it was interesting to see how they ran ideation sessions, separating out ideation by screen and getting the team to choose the screens they want to work on.

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