Crafting an engaging experience to help Indian travellers explore and plan holidays on HolidayIQ.com

The Problem

The leisure travel start-up in Bangalore had been in operation for 8 years. The start-up maintained a website – HolidayIQ.com which attracted an engaged community of travellers. Holidaymakers sought answers to travel-related questions, looked up information on holiday destinations, and submitted hotel booking inquiries.

HolidayIQ.com had up-to-date information on remote destinations in India and tons of useful user-generated content in the form of reviews, photos, answers to FAQs etc. The issue was that this content was hidden from its users. The Search feature was dysfunctional and the site lacked a good discovery and navigation system. The website design looked dated.

Users & audience

Community of travellers on HolidayIQ.com, holidaymakers looking for information, hotel accommodation across destinations in India and South East Asia.

Team & role

I joined HolidayIQ.com as Head of design in 2012. My role involved leading UX design and research efforts for web and mobile products that would help travellers explore and plan holidays. In my first year at HolidayIQ.com, I worked with the CEO and a senior product manager to successfully establish a design process that was missing until then. With no design function in place, product development took place without any design or research input. A UI designer took requirements from the product manager and executed feature requests. I held several UX workshops for all employees including product, engineering, content and marketing teams to familiarise them with the user-centred design (UCD) process. Introduced more hands-on, collaborative, visual ways of problem-solving with product managers. After 15 months in my role, I built a small team of 3 designers supporting me in various product and marketing initiatives for HolidayIQ.com.

Design process & insights

Once the team changed the way we worked, together with my PM and the community relations team, we gained access to a group of HolidayIQ members and travellers. We conducted interviews and gained qualitative insights about their current experience with the website and their top-pain points. These were;

1. Finding relevant information about destinations, hotels, railway bookings and so on involved a lot of effort.
2. The form to send booking enquiries on the website did not work.
3. The site looked outdated and cluttered.

Design solution

Based on the above insights, I redesigned the website adhering to contemporary standards in visual and interaction design. Besides a complete visual refresh, more importantly, we built a discovery layer and a robust navigation system to aid content discovery. In addition, we also designed a refreshing section called HolidayIdeas, aimed at increasing engagement and inspiring travellers to indulge in the theme-based exploration of holiday destinations.

HolidayIdeas: Theme-based holiday inspirations

Outcome & learnings

The redesign efforts contributed to leads increasing 10-fold and click conversion doubling on the site within 2 years.