Exoticca

Vacation packages to exotic destinations

Exoticca is an online tour operator made up of passionate travel experts whose goal is to help travelers worldwide fulfill their dreams.

My role as a UX Designer at Exoticca spanned all stages of the design process, including understanding the company's long-term goals, customer needs, and market context; developing outcome-oriented hypotheses and concepts; creating prototypes; conducting user research and customer interviews; working on interaction and visual design; and delivering and optimizing features.

The projects you're about to see were completed in the first half of 2024.

Who you are and what you do

1. Redesigning the homepage

To transform the homepage from a product catalog into a brand showcase that clearly communicates “who you are and what you do”, while still maintaining its transactional focus.

In 2023 Exoticca launched a TV and online campaign “What a time to be alive” presenting Exoticca as an affordable online tour operator. A company that employs expert Travel Crafters design extraordinary vacation packages at never-before-seen prices to give a truly unforgettable experience.

After interviewing customers, we realized there was a significant lack of trust. This may be due to the high ticket prices, but also because the primary attraction strategy focuses on offering the lowest prices, which made customers suspicious, questioning why it was so cheap. Additionally, customers primarily learn about Exoticca through email alerts from travel deal companies like Travelzoo.

Quoting NNGroup: "A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits." Following heuristic guidelines: make the site's purpose clear, help users find what they need, reveal site content, and use visual design to enhance—not define—interaction design.

The Synergy Between Conversion Rate Optimization and User Experience

2. Removing Complexity

Exoticca offer a complex product: multi-city trips with intricate itineraries, often spanning different countries. Customers needed to choose an itinerary, select accommodations (hotels and rooms), flights, and various add-ons, such as extra activities or meal plans.

The existing checkout process required users to review the itinerary, pick a travel date, and then navigate a complicated series of customization options to upgrade their trip. This created a high cognitive load, causing many customers to abandon the online process and turn to sales agents instead. As a result, online conversion rates were impacted, and the company's reliance on sales agents made it difficult to scale the business without hiring and training more staff.

Objective

Streamline the experience by merging the exploration and purchasing phases. Customers could now explore trips while simultaneously providing traveler information and selecting accommodations, flights, and otherwebsiteroach reduced complexity and made the booking process more seamless, hoping to improve the overall online conversion rate.

Over the course of four years at Exoticca, I closely collaborated with talented designers such as Pili Giménez, Erdem Onel and Corentin Caton. I also had the pleasure of learning from and working with Product Managers like Oscar Molina, François Ridolfi, and Ramon Rodríguez, among others, as well as Engineering and Data teams (Matej Strašek, Kristian Ivaylov, Miguel Medina), and stakeholders from Marketing, Customer Experience, Sales, Operations, and Data throughout the end-to-end design process. In my final years, I primarily focused on the conversion rate optimization team, ensuring that decisions were informed by the right insights to deliver maximum value." Thank you to all of you for helping me to become a better person and a better professional; and thanks to Laith Khatib for hiring me ;)