The thesis entitled Renovation of the website and improvement of user experience of a cheap travel deals search engine begins with an introduction to the process of designing a web interface. The theoretical part examines the trends and guidelines for website design in 2019 and presents the customer’s product, its goals and purpose. Based on the target audience, five user personas were developed to make it easier to base the new design around their needs. After having thoroughly analyzed the original website design and the existing user experience based on the data from analytics tools such as Hotjar and Google Analytics, a plan of how to approach the user interface redesign was created. In addition to changing the color palette, the shape of the buttons and adding micro animations to certain elements, the layout of the search form was redesigned. A great deal of effort was put into redesigning the input functionality for departure and return dates of travel as preliminary tests had shown that users had been confused with all the different options available in the initial design and struggled to find the one they wanted.
The redesign was done using a mobile-first approach. Particular effort was put into ensuring that the website is useable on all the devices the users had when visiting the website - from the smallest of mobile devices detected during testing, to tablets, laptops, desktop devices with larger screens and up to cinematic format for ultra-wide screens. The new design is brighter, cleaner, clearer and more intuitive based on the results from a short survey that was being conducted through the website among the users who volunteered to participate during the first three months after the redesign.
Based on the findings presented in the conclusion of the thesis, we can summarize that despite the satisfactory results and an overall positive response from the users there is still work to be done as the website must constantly follow the ever-changing design trends to maintain its relevance amongst new and existing users.
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