Have you ever stopped to wonder why you enjoy your favorite applications so much? Software developers also have designers in their team who are focused on creating the best designs and user experiences that allow people to navigate and enjoy the software. Using different apps provides different experiences and why exactly is this so?
Well, the answer lies in user-centric designs (UCD). By having this type of approach, it allows developers to easily create preferred apps and the best experiences that allow people to naturally feel comfortable using the app.
This is even more important for your corporate travel site, since travelers want a user-centric approach, since we all know that travel is personal. You need to make sure that your site is helpful and engaging for travelers, and to do so, we’ll dive deeper into this article to show you how.
Make your UX accessible to all users
You need to always ask the question: For which users are you designing your software? The truth is that you need to design for as many people as you can. This includes people of all groups: vision impairments, deafness, hearing issues, cognitive impairments, or any other cognitive condition possible. Everyone wants the right to view a website while traveling.
Overall, it’s important to acknowledge the fact that each individual has different abilities and levels. Thus, when designing your product, you need to make sure that the colors, graphics, and page layouts on your website can be viewed easily. Did you know that more than 15% of the global population suffers some form of disability? Considering that, it’s important to follow these guidelines.
To get a better idea, you can always follow guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the international community that shows people how web standards should be.
Ask travel agencies for advice
Travel agencies are great for providing you with the advice you need, especially when it comes to checking out how helpful your website design may be. Travel agencies can help simplify your booking and management process.
Traveling always remains unpredictable, but travel management companies have control over travelers and can inform them of anything they need to be aware of. Moreover, when it comes to your website design, travel agencies will advise you to make it:
- User-friendly: Ensure your website is easy-to-navigate, or else your bounce rate will increase. Travelers are always on the rush, so they most likely don’t have time to start learning how to use your website. Therefore, you should make sure you categorize travel agencies logically.
- Mobile responsiveness: Make sure your site is optimized for your mobile device and allow users to access the platform at any time. Avoid allowing your site to take more than 3 seconds to load. Some websites take on average more than three seconds to load, but statistics claim that 40% of visitors will leave if it takes longer than that.
- Interactive map integration: Interactive maps can show the locations of local travel agencies, and in case users need their help, they can easily find them through the map you have on your site. After all, it all depends on which country the traveler is heading to. For instance, if Ireland is their destination, you can easily show them a list of business travel agencies in Ireland.
- Client reviews: If there’s one important feature in a site’s design, it’s to include good reviews. People trust positive reviews much easier than not showing any. They never said word of mouth was the strongest marketing tool for no reason.
Each travel agency is different, but it’s important to accept advice, especially when you are talking to one that has many years of experience in the industry.
Use subtitles for business communication
Subtitles are highly important for business communication when you are on a corporate travel site and showing videos. Subtitles for business communication should be used on your travel site since they can improve corporate communication, from external social media channels, to product videos, and corporate training material.
Overall, subtitles are an excellent way to overcome the language barriers that many travelers face. They allow free flow of information and their purpose is to effectively get the message across. After all, consider yourself solving a huge problem many travelers face when they are on the road.
Establish clear call-to-action (CTA)
A CTA is important for allowing your users to take action when needed, offering them a button, or link that allows them to use another page. Travel blogs find it useful to have CTAs since it can allow users to book vacations, tours, and while doing so, this is promoting your brand.
The average conversion rate of a CTA is 2.4%, so if you can achieve anything above this, it’s great for you.
They are great to use for engaging your audience and for making your services more interesting. CTAs can direct your audience to different platforms such as social media, pages, services, and invite you to connect with them there.
Before incorporating your CTA, you need to follow some rules, and they include:
- Make your CTA button clear: The visitor needs to understand what makes them click the link. It doesn’t waste their time and gets straight to the point. For example, if you create a CTA that is inviting people to book, you should make your CTA clear about it.
- Use action language: To encourage visitors to take action, you need to use action language. Use action verbs such as “Book”, “Learn”, “Subscribe”, and anything else you can think of.
- Keep it short: Ineffective CTAs are ones that are too long and wordy. The important step here is to make your text brief straight to the point. By keeping your CTAs shorter than four words, you are making it easier to increase your chance of lead conversion. Strong verbs encourage users to take action.
Above all, don’t forget to place it in visible areas and use bright colors. You don’t want your users to have difficulties when viewing the CTA. That’s definitely not a good practice.
Make high-quality visual elements
When we talk about the visual elements of your travel site, we are talking about the icon, logo, font, and color. These images highly reflect your brand’s identity and personality. Try showcasing the work culture of your business, your team, your office, and many more exciting things you have on your website.
If you have any experiences traveling with your colleagues, you can post it on your site. It makes your website look much more appealing to travelers and motivates them. Keep in mind to make your images high-quality, but not overstuff your website with images. Too many images can reduce site speed, and that means your bounce rate will go up.
Moreover, you can also consider using short clips as guidance. Videos definitely bring destinations to life.
If you want to find a balance between images and text, follow the 50-50 rule. It means that you should fill half of your website with text and the rest with images.
Aim to make your text descriptive, and organize them between images.
As for images, compress them to under 150KB and under 1MB for larger graphics. You could use popular tools like TinyPNG, or ImageOptim to optimize your images without reducing their quality.
Streamline your booking process
It’s important to streamline your booking process on your site since it’s the key to providing users with a good experience that doesn’t keep them from coming back. In order to optimize the booking flow, it’s important to consider the following tips:
- Offer guest checkouts: Guest checkouts mean you can skip creating accounts. This reduces obstacles and makes the process much more simple. You can register contact details during guest checkout. After the booking is complete, send over an email to encourage users to create an account, access booking details and get a hold of special offers.
- Minimize form fields: Only ask users for the information they need. Don’t frustrate them with unnecessary questions. It’s definitely not a smart idea to do so.
- Offer multiple payment options: Providing different payment methods like debit cards, credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, is great for allowing customers to pay with their preferred option.
If you want to make your booking experience exciting, then, it’s important to apply these practices.
The reason your website design should be user-centric
Your website is built for your prospects so it’s important that you do them a favor and make it as accessible as possible. As we said before, everyone deserves the right to access a website and above all, making your website user-centric even for those with disabilities is great for you and even gives you a competitive advantage.
Don’t forget about including the right CTAs and balancing your page layout with descriptive text and images you need for doing so. It’s important to compress your images, but ensuring that you don’t lose its quality while doing so.
The Author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. For roughly four years, Tony has managed to write more than 500 SEO-optimized articles and most of them have ranked #1 on Google. When writing, Tony’s main focus is to carefully do research and make sure that his content is high-quality.