The idealo flight comparison platform was approaching a 15 year anniversary since it was founded in 2005. Unfortunately over this period the legacy code had never been completely revamped and cracks started to show. Performance was degrading, adding new features was slow and painful and in particular the mobile UX was stuttering into a bug-filled mess. It was time for a complete overhaul into brand new code using the most modern frameworks, specifically React.
We identified the search form as the most integral and wide spread component of the webpage. The search form appears on almost every page of our platform and is essential to the user operating our flight comparison service. With this realisation we selected the search form as the first component we could completely redesign and recode as it would have the greatest impact.
Our goal was to recreate the search form, so that it is quicker, intuitive and clean. The developers and I had the wish that all of the assets which make up the search form will be abiding by our design system (see wingspan). The product owner and I had the wish that the new search form would be utilising idealo’s strong branding assets effectively to pull the idealo flight product closer to idealo’s other renowned platforms such as their shopping platform.
The users of idealo flight cover a wide spectrum with 21,000 visits per day. In redesigning the search form component, we placed special focus on the mobile UX. We did this due to the KPIs in Google analytics which signalled very poor conversion rates in mobile compared to desktop.
I was the sole UX designer working with a Product Owner and a team of 5 developers.
My responsibilities included conceptualising, designing and testing the search form.
The scope was restricted to only carrying over features that were already in the old search form. It was essential that in this period no new services would need to be built in order for the front end redesign to be implemented.
A constraint that wasn’t accounted for at the beginning of the project is that idealo would switch design software half way through the project from Sketch App to Figma. This, fortunately, wasn’t too painful for myself, seen as Figma could open Sketch files relatively cleanly and therefore carrying the work over to the new software was not as dramatic as initially feared.
I began the project by capturing the spectrum of search form structures and elements we already had that needed to be brought over into the new search form. Once all of the pieces were laid out in a Sketch file, we could begin to streamline the requirements and conceptualise solutions for the search form.
It was clear from this point I would need to conceptualise: