Ryanair Rooms
When I first started at Ryanair I was curious about their proposition, they are the biggest airline operating in Europe and they revolutionized the air space with their Low Fare offers.
My first assignment was Ryanair Rooms, a service offered when booking your flights and also by email and Home page to book hotels and B&Bs, much like Booking.com but offering a comparison tool like Trivago or Kayak but without redirecting to the partner page. We also had our microsite, which received visits from their app and email campaign.
Over time we had an extensive backlog with a great deal of design debt in it, like inconsistent buttons, solutions that were only partially implemented and a mistrust on the user’s side as we grew faster than sometimes we could manage, leading to pieces of information that weren’t clear, different levels of information for each page, formatting issues and so on.
We were a late player in a red sea, but with a great company behind.
We started looking at the brilliant work of our Research team and the things they flagged, analysed our competitors (booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, hrs, Priceline, Agoda, etc) and some companies that are not directly performing the same service as Ryanair Rooms but related or really close (Skyscanner, Trivago, Tripadvisor, kayak, Google Travel, some airlines and so on) to check what were they offering, where they stand out, how they engage their customers and how they structure the hierarchy of information on their pages.
We looked closely on how our users were using our website (Hotjar) to identify where they were struggling and tested a few solutions along the way to verify our assumptions or just to discuss what could be developed to reduce manual tasks and errors.
Also, we looked at our backlog to cluster pain points and maybe try to tackle a good portion of our usability and perception problems on what would become an update on our UI, but incorporating a few new elements, simplifying the quest to find a good room.
We had some constraints that were far from our reach. We dealt with different providers (with their requirements and particularities), had limited capabilities for development, and we were running other projects in the background, like testing our algorithm and bringing new features: a booking manager and a more robust system for transactions.
Everything we do we like to think on an MVP solution and phasing the full solution into sprint sizeable pieces trying to level our releases, and in the meantime refactoring a few old pieces of code on our website.
We run a few tests and got good feedback from users, so we begin our journey on adjusting the tone of voice and making sure that we were not wasting our resources untying the knot instead o buying new ropes.
Thanks!
