Project Objective
My Role
The Outcome
A redesigned Flight Details page that addressed key user needs and generated a 45.4% increase in users visiting at least one revenue-generating product area.
Project Background
Over 100,000 users visit the Heathrow Airport website every day. It offers several revenue generating products including; parking, fast track security, Heathrow Express train tickets and a Reserve & Collect shopping service. Yet most visitors come solely to check flight information, then leave.
The challenge? We didn’t know much about these users and what might encourage them to engage more with Heathrow digitally. My role was to find out:
Why people visit Flight information pages and what they expect to find.
Where they encounter friction in getting required information.
How we might guide them towards relevant, revenue-generating products to improve the projects primary metric, Average Customer Spend.
Our Approach
To meet these research objectives, my team and I conducted an analytics deep dive using Adobe Analytics and Contentsquare, before speaking with 10 users via Moderated Usability Testing to observe their natural behaviours when tasked with preparing for their visit to/from Heathrow Airport.
Through this research, it became clear the page needed a complete redesign. So I then led this redesign process, collaborating with Heathrow’s Marketing and Operations teams, testing the new design with three core audiences: departing passengers, arriving passengers, and those meeting someone at the airport.
The discovery phase started by utilising Adobe Analytics to understand journey level insights such as funnel drop-offs, acquisition channels, device trends and behavioural differences across key customer segments.
I then investigated page level analytics using Contentsquare to understand engagement within the page, where it quickly became obvious that users were seeing nothing but flight information, as only ~10% scrolled below the fold on both Desktop and Mobile - where information about Heathrow products lived.
We ran Moderated Usability Sessions with 10 users across Desktop and Mobile. A methodical recruitment process ensured that all participants were actively preparing for an upcoming trip to/from Heathrow Airport.
Interestingly, there were no major friction points for users, who were able to find critical flight information with ease. This helped them meet their core user need of planning what time to get to the airport to avoid ‘pre-flight anxiety’.
However, having expected information about their flight only, most users felt no need to explore content beneath the fold, opting to leave the website at this point. This limited their exposure to other Heathrow services, and importantly from a commercial perspective the cross-sell opportunities these presented.
Our Discovery phase concluded with 44 UX issues identified. Most of these being low-mid severity issues for users but much larger problems commercially.
This created a unique challenge for optimising this page. To align with user needs we needed to keep flight information prominent, but we needed to create additional value that would encourage users to engage more with the page and view other Heathrow Services.
This led to my recommendation to completely redesign the Flight Detail pages.
When tasked to find Heathrow services such as available restaurants in their terminal, users struggled
A key priority in this design stage was to bring stakeholders along for the journey to ensure the designs were compliant, feasible and in line with business priorities. Our key steps were therefore:
Working with the Heathrow’s Operations team to map out the various user flows for both departing and arriving passengers.
Running a Collaborative Ideation Session with stakeholders.
Low fidelity wire-framing and High fidelity designs, with weekly design reviews.
Prototype Usability Testing with 10x users (where stakeholders viewed sessions live) to identify any significant issues with the new approach.
During this process, we decided that to address the core Job To Be Done of minimising pre-flight anxiety, we needed to embark on a ‘Door to Gate’ timeline approach. This strategy included:
Removing redundant content such as hero images and repetitive copy.
Improving the integration of cross-sell content with the critical information users need (e.g. putting security fast track by estimated security wait times).
Utilising tabs and flyouts to remove non critical content from the default view.
Removing content that wasn’t deemed valuable by users.
Future-proof the page for subsequent personalisation opportunities.
Our new Mobile Flight card page for Departing Passengers, at different scroll depths
The Outcome
Unfortunately we couldn’t A/B test these designs, but by soft launching these one terminal at a time, we were able to perform Contentsquare analysis to compare user engagement across the old vs new versions of this page. This analysis did show a large engagement increase, with highlights including:
45.4% increase in users visiting at least one revenue-generating product area. Which was largely comprised of:
73.2% rise in users navigating to the parking funnel.
44.1% rise in users navigating to the Fast Track security funnel.
19.0% rise in users navigating to the retail ‘Reserve & Collect’ funnel.
