Creative State – Web Design and Graphic Design Edinburgh Leeds UK

easy-breaks.com, part of the North British Trust Group, is one of the UK’s leading holiday companies, offering holidays at over 300 hotels throughout the country, with a great selection of late availability holidays as well as themed and event-led breaks such as murder mystery, activity breaks, festive holidays and tribute and entertainment breaks.

Brief

The overall objective was to deliver a new e-commerce website that ensured greater user experience, highlighted the choice of available breaks in a clear and concise way, and enabled users to search for their breaks through a number of channels without being overwhelmed by the available functionality.

Planning

The project began with an intense planning phase which involved Creative State and partners Occupancy Marketing and Ezone Software.

To ensure we fully understood easy-breaks.com’s needs we met with all partners and mapped out a phased design and digital review, which took into consideration the improvements easy-breaks.com wanted to make, as well as research into competitors, target customers and market trends. We also reviewed current search engine optimisation reports which provided insight into how existing customers were using the site.

Following the review stage we presented concepts as well as a range of beneficial digital ideas that would help to not only shape the design but market the website changes to new and existing customers.

Solution

The improved design not only reflects the fresh approach of easy-breaks.com but delivers a range of new features that enable users to book quickly and easily. Emphasis has been placed on providing as much information as possible in a clear and concise way and new features include a search facility where visitors can search by break type, by hotel or by both.

A range of late deals and featured breaks are also available, which can be adjusted to suit taste and budget, and each hotel has its own page where you can discover more about the location, as well as view image galleries, online videos and customer reviews and available breaks. Customers can also manage breaks, view booking history and write reviews through an exclusively branded ‘mybreaks’ accounts.

To launch the site, we created a ‘new features’ animation which provided an overview of new and improved functionality.

Result

The design has proved a great success with customers and statistics have shown an immediate improvement in the way users interact with the website. The time spent on the site has improved, and sections such as late deals are more widely used. Customers are also making use of their ‘mybreaks’ page by managing breaks and writing reviews.

“Since the easy-breaks.com website has been redesigned the average time that users spend on the site has increased and the number of users leaving from the home page has dropped by 7%. The most important trend is the shift in the way that users are browsing the site, with traffic to some of the main offers and deals pages increasing many times over due to the inclusion of changeable drop down lists of offers on the home page.”

Jonathan Ellis, Occupancy Marketing

Tags: Brand development, corporate video, Creative State, e-commerce, Easy Breaks, website design

This entry was posted by Sarah on wednesday, june 30th, 2010 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Design projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.