Maturing a design vision
As part of the interview process and whenever I had some down-time I would concept out future visions for the Byway brand and product.
This provided conversation points and helped inspire the team with a future design direction. Unfortunately technical constraints proved too great to allow for these concepts to become reality during the time I was at Byway.
Aim
Initial conversations aligned my vision for Byway and the business expectation of having a brand that was simple, friendly, approachable and not too distant from modern travel magazines such as 'Fieldfare' 'The Maverick guide' and 'Sidetracked'. I wanted to apply some patterns found in these examples and apply them to the existing Byway brand to mature Byway's general aesthetic.
New Concept
Below represents my interpretation of Byway's product, brand message and tone. I wanted to explore how to encourage certain customer behaviours in the direction that was beneficial to Byway.
In addition, I wanted to rely on the new design's cleanliness and simplicity to help instil a sense of trust in visitors towards the Byway product and service.
Key Points
- Mega navigation - These are a great way to represent potentially useful information to the customer without forcing them to navigate to an entirely new page. It's also a great way to gauge customer interest on particular content and can help inform future content strategies.
- Quick form - This was implemented by Byway but in a simplified form. This allows customers who quickly get to the 'Trip builder' quickly by specifying their requiremts early and in a representation which is familiar across other travel websites.
- Social proof - Whilst the previous design had the same Trip advisor information displayed, I felt it needed to be more visually important, it's a great way to offer a form of social proof and can invoke 'FOMO' to customers, encouraging them to continue navigating throughout the site.
- Clearer messaging - I feel the previous version didn't explain what Byway was and why the customer should use them clearly enough. This new designed copy makes Byway's mission and advantage clearer to a potential customer.
- More visual imagery - Richer online content has been proven to get more engagement from visitors. I wanted to explore this by adopting more imagery across the design.
- Clearer calls to action - In the previous design, the primary button style was used in many places, from simple navigation, to booking trips and a number of others. I wanted to reduce this diversity to keep calls to action more visually identifiable and focussed.