Overview

Working for Webcredible a User Experience Agency I collaborated to promote Saga holidays to Saga users. I took Saga stakeholders on the journey of digital transformation while evangelising the benefits of good user experience.

Goal

Increase the discoverability of the wide range of Saga holidays and inspire users through the digital transformation of The Saga website.

Content Analysis

To gain an understanding of Saga’s information architecture and the web content I conducted a content audit. I then created a site map using post-its to visualise the Saga website. This helped the team and I to work collaboratively. We went through the site map discussing if pages inspired users or helped them discover holidays. I noticed the disjointed journey in finding multiple holiday types (cruises, holiday packages and tour holiday) in a single destination.

My hypothesis

By creating new groupings which users understood in the information architecture, users would discover Saga holidays that inspired them.

Client Workshop

We held an ideation workshop with Saga Travel to gain business insights on their product set. The Saga Travel team prioritise the information and products by importance to the business. They then imagined new ways of discovering holidays and dot voted on them.

Competitor Analysis

To gain inspiration on different ways of grouping holidays I looked at competitors focusing on their information architecture. This was helpful in highlighting what level of the information architecture groupings surfaced. The P&O Cruises website stood out as it had holiday types in the navigation with different ways of grouping holidays and it also had a ‘discover’ section of the navigation to inspire users.

Information Architecture

Using the information I had gathered from my competitor analysis and workshop, the team and I rearranged the site map post-its focussing on joining product sets in a coherent user journey. We created two new information architectures. One similar to other travel companies and the second was more imaginative and conceptual. I worked on the traditional concept and got it ready for user testing in Treejack.

Sketches

The team and I held a design studio. We sketch some design concepts for the product grouping pages. We did three rounds of rapid sketching and at the end of each round, we gave feedback on each other's sketches.

Concept Designs

We created six different concepts which explored the different ways that we could group Saga holidays together. I digitised two sketches and prepared them for user testing.

Usability Test

To get qualitative validation we tested the information architecture and the wireframe in the UX lab with the target users. I conducted the user testing sessions with participants with the Saga stakeholders present in the viewing room. The participant answered questions using Treejack on the information architecture. They were then asked to put the concept wireframes in order of which they found more helpful in finding holidays and then which would inspire them more.

User Feedback

I examined the results from user testing to see if my hypothesis was validated. Users quickly found different types of holidays in the new groupings. It also showed that the traditional travel site information architecture was easier to navigate but the imaginative one was more inspiring. I communicated the results back to the client and then worked on combining the strong points from both information architectures.

For the design concepts, I iterated two designs that were most desirable to the users.

Usability Test

We tested our hybrid information architecture remotely to get quantitative feedback from participants. We received better results with participants finding it easier to navigate to pages and being inspired to look through the product offering.

Delivery

We present our work and gave the client project documents which included the content audit, all three information architectures, all of the design concepts, the results from the Treejack user testing and our recommendations going forward which were:

• Work with the internal content team to surface copy and images for the design concepts.

• Test the design concepts quantitatively.

• Work on the taxonomy of Saga products.