Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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P Pratyusha Reddy | reddy.pratyusha@gmail.com

Revamping the online holiday planning experience

Product Design | PGDPD
Guide: Rupesh Vyas
Sponsor: Cognizant Technology Solutions, Hyderabad

Keywords
Holiday planning
task organisation
visual experience
web design

Club Mahindra has been running its award-winning website for the past eight years. However, an evaluation of the website showed that much had to be improved in terms of its information architecture. I had to make the data more organized and accessible to the users and provide vacationers with a pleasant holiday-planning experience. Thus, my diploma project involved user study, information architecture, interface and experience design and finally resulted in a visually rich website.

The heuristic evaluation was followed by an extensive user study, carefully drafting and generalizing the users and their journeys on the website. Every step of a task that was performed regularly and extensively was scrutinized. Problems such as the filling of exhaustive forms online were identified and dealt with. With a clear understanding about the requirements, my team developed a wireframe and ideas. The concept of ‘the planning engine’ or the metaphor of a circle was used to organize tasks better for planning: for users, as well as the clients. The circle helped by giving multiple start points for the holiday planning experience.

The visual language played a key role in my final web design. Since the theme was a holiday, the mood was set with the help of pictures and thus the final website had a visually rich frame. The resort selection pages were also filled with readily available visual data in order to attract the customer who would read about all the facilities at a resort, while planning his/her trip.

I was fortunate to have a client, who I met and interacted with at every stage of the project. This has been an enriching experience.