Manage My Holiday to My Click&Go
Click&Go
Click&Go are an Irish online travel agency that have been successfully selling holidays in the Irish market since 2010. Predominantly selling European sun holidays, city breaks and Cruise holidays
The Challenge
How do you get more people to purchase your product? Not an uncommon question for anyone that is working on the business end of an online sales funnel. There are many tried and trusted methods of getting people to buy more stuff – sales, offers, discounts, vouchers and promotions etc. These are good short term strategies but ultimately if you don’t get repeat business the cost of acquisition will remain high and the cycle continues.
A long term strategy is to look at who is engaging with your product and what channels they are using, what can be learned for that and how can that be enhanced?
At Click&Go two channels which had high engagement were examined, they were email subscription and the Manage My Holiday portal.
For this case study we will be looking at the transformation of Manage My Holiday as part of the engagement strategy.
Manage My What?
Manage My Holiday was a customer portal for Click&Go customers. In the portal they could view booked and previous holidays, pay for their holiday, view invoices etc. The functionality was limited e.g., it was not responsive and the design was out of keeping with the rest of the site.
It was identified as an area that could use to drive customers and non-customers to increase engagement and sales. Manage My Holiday would have to be redeveloped to fulfil any of its potential
The strategy
1. Realise
An assment of Manage My Holiday
2. Future
What a holiday portal would look like?
3. Rebuild
Set out a plan to rebuild and improve
1. Realise
In order to see if redesigning Manage My Holiday was a worthwhile exercise a research plan was formulated to gather data as to what was going on in Manage My Holiday. The data for Manage My Holiday was limited, from what was available we could tell the following People with an account were more likely to book again by a conversion rate of ~4.5% vs ~0.5% of other users.
2. Future
We took the data we had available and conducted a stakeholder workshop. Key departments from Click&Go were represented
- Sales – They have a lot of insight of what people are inquiring about when thinking about a holiday and when they have booked one.
- Operations – What frequent repetitive tasks could be automated so the customers and potential customers could self-serve
- Marketing – How could the portal be used to drive engagement, promotions offers etc.
- Development – What areas would be the easiest to build and what could go into the minimum usable product
- UX – Will the customer use it? What does the customer want to use? How will the information hierarchy work, how will it fit into the overall flow of the site
The user story mapping technique was used to map out a vision for the product. This was only the beginning and all the assumptions would be tested before they were put live and monitored after.
Of the many advantages of user story mapping two always standout
- It helps in formulating information architecture
- Everyone can see what they contributed to and helps with team engagement.
User Story Mapping Workshop images
The user story map adapted and changed over time. This was only the beginning and all the assumptions would be tested before they were put live and monitored after.
One of the advantages of user story mapping it helps in formulating information architecture of what you are planning to build.
Manage My Holiday Survey
The Information from the workshop was then used to set up a survey on Manage My Holiday. With the objective to find out what features customers said they would find the most useful. The results were as follows:
%
Document retrieval
%
Holiday management
%
Saved searches
%
Holiday favourites
%
User profile
%
FAQ/ Help
%
Save payment details
We adapted HotJars Net Promoter Score (NPS) score to rank the different options. We used this as a guide to validate the main sections for the road map for My Click&Go.
Ideation
After the story mapping workshop the data had to be processed. The story mapping needed to be seen as a living document and one that would evolve as information was gained.
Several workshops were undertaken to assess the information architecture and to generate ideas for how the information would be displayed.
What would the overall architecture of the portal look like and what were the shortcomings discovered so far and what could be done about that? What additional pages and information would be required?
Ideation sessions were undertaken with as many of the stakeholders as possible. The sessions were used to get new perspectives on what is required for features and functionality. As it was a completely new product there were legacy issues from the existing service. The only consideration was that it would have a similar look and feel to the existing Click&Go site
Ideas and suggestions that did not make it into the minimum usable product were to be considered for tests and when more data was available.
3. Rebuild
The new portal was going to be rebuilt to engage all users, so the requirements had to change.
The long term vision was to create a portal where any logged in members can save favorite holidays and avail of offers as an incentive to purchase a holiday. Where holidaymakers can manage their holiday, make changes, purchase upgrades and other services.
We created a problem definition that we could all work towards:
Problem statment
Create a user portal where customers can manage their holidays and other account holders would derive benefit
First off a new name was decided upon “My Clic&Go” rather than “Manage My Holidays” which was clearly very specific to having booked a holiday.
Design and development
The User Story map was broken out into a project plan with phased deliverables.
The first deliverable was the minimum usable product which had to contain all the existing functionality of the previous portal and an area for users to keep their saved holidays. This to accommodate account holders that had not yet purchased a holiday.
The team
- UX Design x1
- Production management x1
- Development front end x1
- Development back end x1
- Content specialist as required
My Role in the project
As the Head of UX I led the design phase and oversaw it’s implementation. This involved working closely with the developers in the initial design phases and scoping out what we were going to build, right through to the final sign off of the designs into development.
One of my other roles was as Product Owner and Production Manager. This involved working with the entire team and managing the workload of the front end developers and coordinating with back end developers.
I was also responsible for keeping the business updated with developments on a weekly basis and often ad hoc progress meetings.
The back end development was undertaken while the design phase was progressing, both were progressed in parallel. This avoided any delays. Wire frames were bypassed as there was an existing pattern library that could be utilised.mConsidering the data and current trends, a mobile first approach was taken. The previous portal was not responsive so this had to be a priority.
High Fidelity mockups were designed and iterations created. This process worked well as we were a small team and could go and sketch out any issues on the white board. This helped us move quickly and adapt to blockers as they arose.
We followed an agile process which helped us get the first version of the portal released under the time budget
The My Click&Go roadmap was included into the overall production roadmap so that further developments could be implemented . Google analytics and HotJar were utilised so that better data could be captured. This was then used to develop out other features on the road map and improve existing ones.
High fedility mockups
Conclusion
The data available (at the time of creating the case study) clearly indicated that users with an account were more likely to convert and had much higher engagement
My Click&Go Sign up statistics
Sign up by device
%
Mobile
%
Desktop
%
Tablet
Conversion rate
%
Signed up
%
Not signed up
Page views
signed up
Not signed up
Holiday views
Signed up
Not signed up
Searches
signed up
Not signed up
From the early data it is clear that meaningful engagement helps to drive sales. The potential for a well constructed portal to increase revenue is clear. With accurate monitoring, timely development and relevant content the portal will increase sales and further engagement.
The user journey mapping was a very good starting point. It helped create a product vision, one that was adaptable to new information and gave everyone a clear view of the product and the overall goal.