Haulfryn Holidays

Pivoting UX around the changing post-pandemic market

INDUSTRY: HOLIDAYS - HOME OWNERSHIP

The challenge

After the pandemic, with an increased appetite for domestic holidays, Haulfryn were keen to redefine their digital presence and develop a competitive edge.

Haulfryn had 10+ websites, covering their various business strands, which had been structured around the organisation and were in need of a restructure based on user need. The north star for the project was an increase in converting online bookings.

The tools

Stakeholder workshop
Competitor analysis
Analytics + Hotjar
Card sorting
Personas
User journeys
Sitemap
First click testing

The research journey

The UK holiday market is incredibly competitive. My competitor review of a large sample of competitor sites centred around competitor IA. Many competitors shared the same three business strands: holidays, holiday homes and residential. This provided a strong base understanding of best practice.

I undertook a deep dive Google analytics review to help fill initial knowledge gaps and shape my future research questions. This highlighted focus areas and pain points for me to delve into even more when reviewing Hotjar recordings of users journeying through the site. I used Hotjar recordings to gain insight into users’ unique behaviours and common journeys.

Haulfryn's diverse audiences required nine user personas, three for each business strand and representing a range of demographics as identified within their previous market research.

Card sorting was implemented to gather perspectives on organising content into logical groups, which provided a strong steer for the information architecture. During the card sorting, there was a particularly strong focus on overlapping aspects of a park that were relevant for both holiday makers and holiday home owners, such as: amenities, activities and the local area. Adding to the increasing rationale that the holidays and holiday ownership sites needs to combine as a single site.

This was a huge architectural shift for the sites, which not only improved usability and access to content, but also provided increased opportunities to upsell and streamline content management. With each holiday location providing slightly different services, the structure could not follow a one-size fits all approach: flexibility was crucial, both in the navigation and page structure.

As the direction for the new site took shape, I created a set of user journey maps to plan the finer details of the new site structure and how it would cater to the various, prioritised users' needs.

Above, I have shared the first few steps of the #1 holiday maker persona. This journeys shows how they find Haulfryn’s site and begin to explore options.

The most powerful change within the user journeys was the decision to keep users on the Haulfryn Holidays site for the entire selection stage of the booking journey, whereas before they diverted to a third party mid-selection early on. This created a lot more certainty for users and reduced user frustration.

Working alongside UX design, I ran first click usability testing on the wireframes to evaluate how well users understood the key page elements and how they would instinctively interact and journey through the pages. It was key to validate how easily users could switch mindsets between holidays and holiday homes, now that these sites had been combined into one site. Could they orientate themselves? Could they use the global search to funnel down to the results they need?

The first click results conclusively validated my discovery work - users clearly understood the two main branches of holiday content and were able to find what they needed quickly and easily.

The outcomes

The site was successfully launched and has seen a month on month increase in holiday sales. The project lead to a longer term relationship with Haulfryn, and further projects with new businesses when Haulfryn team members involved in this project moved to new organisations.