Responsive overhaul for a travel industry website
Gogo's dotcom was disjointed, unresponsive, and built on a legacy platform. The company was also in the middle of a strategic shift, and the target audience for gogoair.com was changing. The challenge was to create a responsive site targeting B2B users, while Improving the experience for B2C consumers who still needed to access their account and purchase passes.
Snapshot
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Conducted usability tests on concepts and presented results to Directors, Executives, and other stakeholders.
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Led workshops with Marketing and Product teams to establish an information architecture for a large catalog of highly technical products.
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Created information architecture and designed mobile and desktop navigation patterns for a B2B website.
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Developed a strategy for handling the translation of the site for international airline partners.
My Role
I was the UX designer and information architect on this project along with a team of front end devs, a product owner, and two visual designers.
What was the problem?
Gogo was growing rapidly and taking on new airline partners. The company was also shifting it's focus from B2C to B2B. The old gogoair.com served consumers looking to purchase in-flight connectivity passes, but it did very little in targeting airlines looking for an inflight connectivity provider.
Concept testing & information architecture
When I started on this project visual designers had started concepting a purely B2B site. While it was highly conceptual and very forward thinking, it didn't meet the needs of our users, airline executives and sales people. My first task was to test the concept, and provide feedback to the designers, creative director, and other stakeholders who had an interest in this project.
Presenting the results of these user tests proved challenging since I was new and I was essentially telling these designers that their concept didn't work. I chose to focus on what DID work, and we ultimately reached an agreement on direction.
I worked closely with the marketing executives and stakeholders to understand the full catalog of products. I conducted workshops with subject matter experts to gain understanding on how to best design the information architecture for a catalog of highly technical products.
Once the information architecture was established, I designed the navigation patterns for both desktop and mobile sites. We used usertesting.com to remote test the consumer portions of our navigation and we tested the B2B sections on users familiar with the industry.
Desktop wireframes
Mobile wireframes
Localization Strategy
Adding complexity to this redesign was the requirement that the site be translated for our international airlines. Portions of the site were not going to be translated though as the cost of doing so greatly outweighed business value. I created a plan to mitigate the disjointed experience. In order to best serve our international partners in the most cost effective way, I identified crucial features of the site that needed to be translated - such as contact forms - so our clients could quickly reach out to the appropriate sales executives.
What was the result?
Because the legacy site wasn’t tagged for analytics, we could not compare our new site traffic to the old. We were able to build a site that’s more flexible so that teams in the future can look at usage and iterate in order to meet KPIs. I will say that launching a site with a stakeholder from every area of the organization on schedule felt like a incredible achievement though.
What would I do differently?
While I’m very proud of the work this team accomplished, there are definitely a few aspects of the site that I wish could improve. There are some visual design aspects that I don't think contribute to a positive user experience. For example, there is a lot of text on top of images which reduces readability. If I could go back, I might find a way to convey that better to the visual designers using research and metrics about best-practices for web content.