Everyone loves a bargain, especially when it’s something you can brag about, but marketing all the various seasonal offers, Bank holiday deals, flash sales and relets, can lead to cognitive overload and a paralysis of choice.
The cottages.com has homepage was suffering from this, which lead to overcrowding and ineffective calls to action.
The site had an “Offers” page, which had a high click rate, but it also had an extremely high bounce rate.
It made sense to make use of this page and store all of the available offers. If a customer visit this page, we can make the assumption that they are in the mindset of looking for a suitable offer, and therefore would not be overwhelmed by a large number of options. The design can also help with this by displaying the information in a aesthetically pleasing way.
The homepage could then be reserved for the most relevant timely offers or current marketing campaign.
Disciplines & Responsibilities:
- UX/UI Design
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Project Lead
- Liaise with Marketing and Ecomm Development
View Old Design
Carousels haven’t a great reputation in the UX world, but we felt that this was the best mechanic to hold the offers. We would know quickly if it wasn’t working by the engagement rate, and would make changes if needed.
The offers became part of the content management system, where marketing now had access to edit and manage the offers dynamically. Certainly a “win, win” for Marketing and the Dev teams.
Some helpful tools were added to the now “Featured Offers” list. Sorting options, availability by month and price range. These options helped narrow down the list and filter out unwanted properties.
A last minute addition to the project was the last minute search. Sales had indicated a shift in booking patterns, where customers were starting to book properties within the next two weeks. These were generally short weekend breaks.
The new design reduced the bounce rate by 80% upwards and increased time on site a little over 5 minutes on average per visitor.
But we didn’t stop there.
We had some discussion about the placement of certain elements on the page. Some felt strongly about placing the last minute search higher up the page. So we ran a variant test that changed the order of the elements.
We discovered the the order had very little effect on visitors site visit time, but we did find the interaction with the other components fell drastically when the last minute search was placed closer to the top of the page.
Although this indicated people would rather perform a search, this layout did not meet the business needs.
The project has been a great success, as well as for the teams involved, helping to build trust, communication and respect for one another.
