The Travel & Tourism industry has transformed over the past few decades undergoing a digital revolution for holidaymakers. In this modern digital business environment, where companies have to compete for user attention like never before, a good user experience has become crucial to business success.

User experience design is often used to describe the usability of an application or the user interface. The true meaning of UX design, though, goes far beyond that. It encompasses the entire process of software design and development. It includes branding, functionality, design, integration, and usability. But, why does it matter so much? Here’s why every business must think about the user experience when they design websites and apps.

UX design is the process of building applications that are relevant and meaningful. Apps that users want to use.

So, how can UX design benefit a business?

Reducing costs

It keeps a project within budget and lowers development costs, including extensive user research, prototyping, and usability testing.

More and more companies are realizing that preventing possible usability issues or problems should be in design stage of the process. Design changes are far easier to make than development changes – and therefore they are less expensive.

Often, the majority of bugs spotted within a product are usability issues. Most of those issues could have been solved in an initial prototyping stage, which is a core aspect of UX design.

Increasing conversions

Making it as easy as possible for your user to interact with your website or app is a key part of UX design. You want your users to be able to find what it was they were looking for. But even more importantly for your business you want to drive conversions and interactions across your web or app. There are two main principles of optimizing websites or apps from a UX perspective.

– Reducing the number of steps that user needs to make is a key part of UX design.  The main goal is to drive conversions and interactions across your website or app. This includes purchasing a product, booking tickets or sorting through a database of complex information.

– Keeping things as intuitive as possible is crucial to minimise the risk of users becoming frustrated when they are trying to complete their task(s) on your website or app.

Improving SEO with UX design

That’s right, Good UX design can result in healthy SEO rankings. Google themselves actively promote great user experience in their search results. This not only translates to SEO, but also paid media or PPC (pay per click) marketing. Platforms like Google Ads (previously known as Google Adwords) actively score the results of your “landing page experience” in your ad campaigns and gives you suggestions to optimize the user journey/focus on these pages.

User experience is a big factor in Google’s search algorithm. Where websites are concerned, a poor user experience can ultimately result poor SEO rankings, or in the case of Paid advertising (PPC), an insufficient ad campaign.

Service Design & Customer Experience

Global Innovations help travel and tourism companies to improve their multichannel offering and co-create innovative user experiences.

We adopt a human-centred, brand-centric design approach leveraging its top-notch capabilities to develop any website or mobile app. The emphasis is on getting a thoughtful user experience, moving from ease-of-use to delight-to-use.