As most people are aware, Thomas Cook had gone in to administration a year prior to its relaunch. The come back for this travelling company would mean not only a second chance for Thomas Cook but also a fresh new business model.
This new approach for the business had to be reflected into not only a new design but also a new tone of voice and overall customer experience. As such, not only the user experience but also the products, the market positioning and the message had to be very clear and inspiring.
As I was responsible for designing all the landing pages (including the home page), navigation bar and quite a lot of mid journey pages, even before opening Figma, I started the project with quite an in-depth competitive analysis to all the key players and started selecting the pros and cons of everyone of them.
Also, since we are starting everything from scratch and to ensure that we would not fall into the same design mistakes as the competitors, I have also conducted a Heuristic Evaluation in the same period to guarantee that we would have a solid foundation and so future iterations would be minimal in the future.
After the usual brainstorming and the creation of the first user flows, the wireframes started to be designed. Great attention was put into the latest design designs but more importantly into the message that every piece of text and especially images would tell about who Thomas Cook is now.
There were 3 important aspects that were considered in my design:
- Inclusive design not only within the Accessibility standards but also considering a vast demographic. This included people from different backgrounds, genders, sexuality and believes.
- User testing was taken very seriously and in great depth. For every new page, new concept, new idea, quantitative and qualitative tests were made to ensure my assumptions
- Multiple versions of the same page were created and tested (A/B). I have also considered feedback from the whole company to ensure that the website was as clear, concise, modern and visually appealing as possible.
There is still quite a lot to do, test, iterate and simplify.
For that, besides the standard design iterations, we are also analysing the data post-launch in the form of heatmaps, user analytics, accessibility standards and most likely I will perform another heuristics evaluation (this time on our website) to ensure the validity of our approach.
The Thomas Cook re-launch had a very positive feedback inmost of the news channels and websites across the UK (including BBC, ITV, The Guardian, Metro, Telegraph, etc).
According to our research, the users seem to be very impressed not only with our product offers but also with our sleek, inspiring, modern, and extremely intuitive design. As I have mostly mentioned the UX aspect of my role, I would suggest you click on the “Behance” button below as it will take you over my UI design for this project.