Increased conversions
The team have seen a 28% increase in conversion rate, and a 78% increase in revenue from bookings.
- Sector
- Travel
- Duration
- 3 weeks
- What we did
- Design research
- User experience design
- Product design
For over a decade, Spabreaks.com has been the leading spa breaks provider in the UK. In that time their small but SEO-savvy team has optimised their booking flow to maximise conversions on the site. Yet with an increasingly competitive market, having a lot of data wasn't enough; they needed to make larger gains and bigger changes. And they would only be able to gain deeper insights through a user-centred design approach.
In an initial 3-week Discovery phase, we provided actionable recommendations on the Spabreaks.com conversion funnel through research and usability testing.
The Clearleft team were a pleasure to work with. They very quickly got into the details of our site and brand and understood our aims. We have begun implementing some of the quick wins suggested by Clearleft and almost instantly saw a noticeable increase in our conversion rates on-site.
The Results
Looking beyond just data
Data by itself is good. Data combined with usability testing is even better. Testing with users helped the Spabreaks.com team get the full picture of their customers and their behaviours, providing valuable insight into how to make considered and meaningful improvements to the experience.
A more defined backlog
By bringing user insights into the decision making and prioritisation processes, Spabreaks.com were able to find the focus they needed to make informed and timely decisions for updating their digital product.
The Full Story
How can we get close to the business fast?
During the project, we spoke to key stakeholders from eight different departments, ranging from customer service to product and technology. We wanted to get a behind-the-scenes understanding of the way the business worked, their strengths, weaknesses and how these influenced the design of the website.
In the first week many of the stakeholders provided additional research and data. In total we spoke to 13 people and uncovered challenges including a lack of resources due to a small team, limited time to work on projects, and no way to prioritise a growing backlog.
The thing that most impressed me about our work with Clearleft was how quickly their staff became "part of the team". The closeness of our collaboration made a really big difference to how we were able to steer the project, and also allowed us to start deploying changes to our site much sooner than would otherwise have been possible. We've been delighted with the impact that the changes they suggested have had on conversion rates and user engagement, and with how carefully they handed over the raw materials to our own staff for refinement and implementation.
Identifying the problems and making recomendations
We rapidly identified usability problems within the website through an Expert Review. Using this review as a lens, Spabreaks.com were, for the first time, able to see their website from the perspective of the customer, revealing improvements they could act on immediately. Along with quick changes, we provided more long-term design recommendations that would help them in the on-going development of the site.
We also assessed competitor sites to see how they designed for their customers and communicated to the Spabreaks.com team examples of best-in-class user-centred design practices in their market. We looked at competitors through the following key areas:
- How the user’s experience is positioned (Proposition and brand message)
- How users might find a spa offering (Navigation/Search/Browse)
- How users might compare and understand a spa offer (Search results)
- How users might compare and understand an offer before purchasing (Product description)
This breakdown gave Spabreaks.com an in-depth understanding of their market competition. Through further quantitative analysis and discussion, we hypothesised that Spabreaks.com is primarily used as a booking agent and that a web visitor's initial browsing behaviours were not supported well by the current design.
Which changes might provide the biggest impact?
We combined internal expert knowledge with Google Analytics data to target some key pages for usability testing. Some pages were shown to have significantly high visits and bounce rates compared to others. Getting underneath the data to uncover what users were really thinking when on pages gave us insight that could provide big impact. We wanted to understand how users browse and search for a spa break and know the pain points and barriers they may be facing that would cause them to leave the website.
It was great to have the team present during usability testing and hear from customers first-hand what some of the biggest pain points were on the website.
The result? Some fascinating details about exactly what customers were concerned with when browsing holiday packages. There were clear patterns as to what mattered to them most on certain parts of their journey through the site. Their needs also shifted as they came closer to booking. SpaBreaks.com had a very concrete understanding of what worked and didn't work for their web visitors.
The Spabreaks.com team were able to quickly implement many of our recommendations and immediately saw positive results in their data. If you compared their data before making changes, they saw a 28% increase in conversion rate and 78% increase in revenue from bookings within 6 months.
We’ve been tracking the performance of our website and have seen immediate and dramatic improvements to the customer engagement on our website. Taking in the recommendations by Clearleft has resulted in an increase in on-line bookings and a reduction in bounce rates on some of our most important pages.
At the end of the project, we had a discussion about how the team felt about the new insights they gained and about the project in general.
Some of the key learnings included:
- Do more user testing
- Think beyond the data
- The power of collaboration: bring a mix of people from different departments into the conversation.