Late last week, we began a small experiment with Cleartrip’s home page. We’re still waiting on the data and will let the experiment run a little longer before we make any decisions, but we thought we’d share the nature of the experiment here with everyone.
This is the home page that we’ve had for a long time now:
There’s been a few minor changes here and there, but this page has looked like this for a long time now–a search form on the left and links to promotional offers and announcements on the right. And the design has worked well for us over the period of time we’ve been using it.
The current design does a great job of letting people start their searches quickly, but it may not be doing the best job of informing people about the full range of offers, promotions and deals available on the site at any time. The plain text links have a low click-through rate (CTR), so maybe users have started to tune them out; maybe the promotional links are now nothing more than a blind spot. The other problem with the above design is that it’s starting to get cluttered as more and more things clamour for the attention of customers.
So, we came up with a new design to meet two separate goals:
- Increase the CTR for promotional offers that are showcased on the home page
- Reduce the clutter accumulated on the page while also preventing the possibility of clutter arising again
This is what our ‘experimental’ home page design looks like:
We hope we’ve come up with an elegant solution to meet our two separate goals–the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone even. By displaying only one promotional link at a time, we’re making each link much more visible. We’re hoping the increased visibility of the link results in increased aggregate click-throughs as well. The display of only one link at a time automatically solves for our second goal of reducing and preventing clutter.
We’re conducting an A/B test right now where half of all visitors are seeing the experimental home page and the other half are seeing the same old home page we’ve always had. We’ll be running this test for a short while longer and will post an update here with details on what the test showed.
We have some more minor tweaks we’ll be pushing out soon to the home page as well, stay tuned for that and for a quick trip down memory lane, where we share the story of how our home page design evolved into the final design we launched with.
Much better. Just a couple of suggestions -
Just increase the speed. (add acceleration, may be?)
Try adding auto-scrolling.
And also, its giving JS error.
That offers box is pink in color!!
@Prajwalit — Thanks. We just rechecked in a bunch of browsers and cannot replicate the error, could you give us some more details so we can investigate and fix?
Using – Ubuntu Chrome.
After clicking on any silde.
http://imgur.com/FdNsE.png
A few thoughts …
1) The bubbles and the arrows on the ads navigator can be a little bigger (with maybe more space in between too). It isn't easy to pinpoint accurately on the circles or the arrows (especially with many using tiny laptop trackpads)
2) You might want to test with auto-scrolling the ads. I'm not sure if it helps your CTR, and also users might get irritated if ads scroll over just as they're reading it. How about a small countdown sticker saying "next offer in xx seconds" or something
My 2 cents
looking nice. possibly you could go to the first offer after the last ? ya and the offer box is pink !@#$!? (in memory of Savitree's shirts maybe ?)
@Prajwalit–thanks for the details, we'll see what we can do to fix.
Girish & quasi–thanks for the feedback, we'll try and make some tweaks after our first experiment concludes. If the data shows that the new home page is performing worse for both goals than the old one, then the entire discussion is moot…
Well, I didn't even bother looking at that small little pink box there – i am sure the pink color was to attract my eye, but not until i saw this blog post!
Changing typography might help! Free, Discount and Cashback are powerful keywords if shown properly would catch the eye!
Icons can be really neat and helpful in grabbing eyeballs. The problem with the current 5-dot system is just that it has been done to death – and given that Cleartrip's almost always been at the forefront of internet innovations especially wrt simplicity and design, this one looks off. Even more so the pink I guess.
Kaushik–we hear you about the icons and we have another icon-driven experiment waiting in the wings.
But with respect to the home page, we're trying to minimise the use of images as far as possible. From a design simplicity standpoint, we have to be very careful about what kind of precedents we set on this page–once we allow something on, it becomes very hard to disallow it later.
Hi Hursh,
I booked lot of tickets using Clear trip but Last experience was v bad with Clear trip. I booked a ticket from Delhi to London Heathrow. I booked the ticket using your webapplication but somehow in my wife ticket its mentioned my name as Mrs, Puneet dwivedi as passenger name, which is ridiculous. I have been calling customer care but of no help and she has to travel tomorrow.
Please do something, i am really fadeup else I have to approach consumer court.
details as below :-
trip id : 10092410677
flight kinfisher it1
date of travel 05/10/2010
pnr cfrzfb
thanks
puneet
Puneet – As per the IT logs, the name entered by you was Mrs.Puneet Dwivedi and post your conversation with one of our executive's today, we have canceled the Trip ID 10092410677. Refund process for the same has been initiated from our end and the amount will be processed back to your account within next 15-20 working days.