Today sees the start of a really exciting period for me and the team. We have been working on the redesign (and replatform) of two of the biggest holiday websites in the UK. The fruits of our hard work, research, concepts, design, prototyping, testing and iterating are beginning to go live! This is the time when we get the numbers to prove the output of all our work!
Today sees the new Homepage go live on the First Choice site (www.firstchoice.co.uk). This the the MVP (Minimal Viable Product), comprising 11 of a total of 30 designed components (the rest will be released incrementally in the coming weeks and months). Also live is the whole new Destination section – pages about all the places that we offer holidays. But these is only the first of a number of really exciting releases.
As things go live, I can start to talk about them and give some context and background to how they came to be, starting with homepage today! Over the next number of posts I hope to give you a complete insight into how I ran the process of such a huge redesign project from a UX & Design point of view, and the outputs.
So, the new Homepage… My vision was simple: Our Homepage should evoke emotion and provide inspiration. It should make people want to go on holiday with us.
I recently had to present how “UX” works here at TUI UK, and in that I outlined the mission statement for what the team does. Our modus operandi as it were. This morning, I was asked for a definition of UX for use in a high level business document, so I extended my UX mission statement, and gave this as a definition:
We take a business problem and craft elegant, beautiful and effective, customer-centric and commercially beneficial solutions. We follow a methodological process, from qualitative and quantitative research all the way through to rapid prototyping and testing, resulting in well thought out, evidence based and validated solutions.
I know that it doesn’t go through all the steps between research and testing (sketching, co-design, paper prototyping etc. etc.), not does it outline the types of research or types of testing (formative, summative, usability, BERT etc.) – but I think that, for a business stakeholder, it gives a nice vignette of what we of.
Welcome to BlobFisk.com, the online home of Alex Horstmann. I'm a User Experience Manager (currently General Manager, User Experience and Design at TUI Travel plc) passionate about usability, user experience and accessibility.
I blog mainly about all things UX, Usability and IA; when I'm too busy to blog I will share some of the interesting bookmarks that I save.
Today sees the start of a really exciting period for me and the team. We have been working on the redesign (and replatform) of two of the biggest holiday websites in the UK. The fruits of our hard work, research, concepts, design, prototyping, testing and iterating are beginning to go live! This is the time when we get the numbers to prove the output of all our work!