THE WEB HAS revolutionised certain eCommerce sectors so much that we often forget how we managed before it. Holiday and travel is one market where being able to jump online and scour hundreds of packages, then make a booking instantly is almost invaluable to modern punters. But who are the people behind these convenient eCommerce solutions, and what kinds of challenges do they present? It is an area of web design that is glamourously unglamourous, although we were delighted when the team behind the new travel.co.uk website agreed to describe how they landed such a project and why they are so proud of it…

OW: Olly Wenn, managing director
AH: Alex Hill, developer
ID: Iain Davidson, designer

OW: We’ve been working within the online travel sector for more than a decade. I developed the first interactive CD-ROM holiday brochures for tour operators such as Virgin Holidays and Eurocamp over 13 years ago. CD-ROM development gave way to the web in 1998 when we created our first travel website for Virgin Holidays. In 2001, I started up Zolv with the intention of focusing purely on web development; by 2005, we were named as one of Deloitte’s Rising Stars. Since then, our portfolio has grown through personal recommendations – without exception. By delivering what we promise, we have managed to build strong relationships with key players in the travel industry, and as these people have moved around, they’ve recommended us to other businesses. I believe it is this pedigree of long-standing relationships, as well as our breadth and depth of experience, which sets us apart from other agencies.

We remain Virgin Holidays’ primary web design and development partner, and over the years we have won other significant accounts in the online travel market, such as Teletext Holidays, InLuxury and most recently, travel. co.uk (TCU).

OW: As with all our work, it was through personal recommendation. We have worked with Ray Mason, the MD of travel.co.uk before, and Ray and I discussed the possibility of travel. co.uk for some time before it got the green light from the backers, so Zolv was in the frame from the outset. The whole idea really appealed to us, and we instantly recognised that it was a unique opportunity to build something really special from scratch. There was no existing brand, no legacy code and it was a very open brief. Travel. co.uk was really excited about the ideas we were bringing to them, and after a highly productive creative session, we were hired.

OW: The main objective was to build a B2C portal on top of Comtec’s holiday search-andbooking engine. The idea was to allow the customer to find, compare and book, all in one place where the price they see is the price they pay. These things would differentiate TCU from other sites in the holiday-comparison space today. Operationally, we had another objective as TCU consists of just three people so the site had to be low maintenance. We had to deliver an administration and content management solution that almost ran itself.

AH: It became clear in the early design phase that what we were going to build was a set of web tools that allowed the customer to search, save and sift through millions of potential holidays. The rationale was that with the rise in popularity of apps such as web mail, Facebook and Flickr, web users are becoming increasingly comfortable with actively using the web rather than passively browsing it. So when we set out to design and build TCU, we were thinking in terms of an application, not a brochure.

ID: That’s not to say we didn’t spend much time on the web design. If the site is simple to use and looks great, we believe customers will be more likely to book a holiday – which is obviously the ultimate goal for TCU. There was considerable focus on functional design and the usability of the application. For us, design is always about the customer experience. There is an argument that the best user experience results from making everything as simple as possible. However, we do ask a little more of the customer than just to browse, point and click. It is too easy to underestimate the end user’s abilities and design to the lowest common denominator; we believe that customers will happily invest a little time with a process that gives them what they want. This is what constitutes a good user experience – one that engages and delivers results.

OW: The brief was initially of quite a high level. It listed a number of third-party suppliers that we had to work with, providing brochure content, weather, ratings, call-centre functionality and so on. Other than these specific integrations, the brief was to design, build and deliver a holiday comparison site, and to put a lot of thought into some kind of filter, shortlist and comparison functionality. Everything else you now see was an output of our design process. So the brief didn’t really shape the site, the end site came from collaboration with the client.

ID: Over the years we’ve established a design process that works really well. We place a lot of emphasis on leading with functional design rather than visual design. We focus on what is technically possible, developing a functional, and most importantly, usable interface before we work on a visual style to complement this. We take the same approach regardless of scale; from the development of a date-entry widget at one end to an entire eCommerce site with multipage booking flow at the other.

We always have a discovery phase with the client and our technical guys to develop initial ideas that shape the functionality of a site. travel. co.uk was no different – we were all working together from the start of the project. Our design process is iterative and has scheduled check points with regular updates and feedback sessions. All of our clients respond really well to this; we work with them to be creative and really think about what it is they want. All the elements of the site are paper prototyped and then argued and reasoned, giving us an ideal starting point for development.

AH: In addition to the design process, and as part of an Agile approach to software development, we use continuous build and integration, which publishes a nightly snapshot of the build. Our client can see and play with the site as it is built, and we encourage early testing and feedback on site features. Getting good feedback early is a real boost to the team. Getting bad feedback early gives us more time to get it right before we deliver! We think this has really helped us to deliver a tight, featurerich website that everyone is really pleased with.

OW: For me, the main rule is to challenge everything in context and start from your first principles. Don’t just follow other people’s rules; if we all did that, there would be no innovation and we’d still be thinking of the web as a hyperlinked document repository. I think it’s better to understand the reasoning behind a rule of thumb, such as ‘eCom checkout pages should be no longer than three pages’ and make sure that the assumptions that lead to that rule apply to your particular situation.

ID: A travel site that offers car hire, room upgrades, flight upgrades, special requests, medical condition declarations, excursion tickets, passenger details and payment as part of the checkout process is likely to fail on many usability counts if the designer tried to cram all of that into three pages. That said, rule of thumb is a starting point, but if there is good reason to deviate from these, then do so.

OW: For TCU, we decided to examine every piece of the site in detail rather than follow the rules… and we still ended up with a threepage checkout. Make of that what you will!

ID: Third-party content always presents a challenge for a designer. For example, when we designed the current site for Teletext Holidays (TTH) where advertising fills more than 50 per cent of the homepage, we decided to go for a bold application of the TTH brand colours to establish Teletext’s identity against the constantly changing adverts. For TCU, we don’t carry third-party adverts and as all third-party content is served to us as XML data without mark-up, we have much more control over how it is displayed on the site. This means we haven’t had to force the host brand so much and we have been able to highlight the usable elements of the interface to a greater extent.

OW: The biggest technical challenge we faced in pulling content from numerous sources was maintaining an acceptable page load time. A results page contains 20 hotels, each with content from several different web services. Getting all of that data back before rendering a page resulted in unacceptable latency, and so we developed an Ajax-based cache control, which allows us do what we call ‘deferred rendering’. The body of the page is served to the browser immediately, while the third-party content is being requested. The third-party content is then sent to the browser and slotted into place as it becomes available. We use this technique a lot on TCU.

ID: Again, having total control over the rendering of the external content is key. We can then make sure that the semantic mark-up is correct. There is a large library of destination content and travel articles on the site as well. This content, while sourced externally, is actually managed in the CMS that we built for the site, so we have a lot of control over that as well.

OW: We also have a set of tools to enable us to create pages containing holiday ideas and suggestions such as ‘last-minute family holidays to Greece’, which provide deep links into pages of highly relevant search results – with this, we are attempting to target the long-tail.

AH: Flash – when used correctly – is an amazing asset to any site. Flash works really well as a marketing tool, but that’s not what we were building. There was no real need to use Flash on this site, other than to deliver some video – another thing that Flash does really well. From our original designs, we could see that there was large amount of information that needed to be presented to the user in real-time. There are numerous data sources and Ajax allows us to instantly present the user with initial internal information, but then show useful, related information as and when it arrives back from external sources.

OW: Security is of the upmost importance, particularly now that there is constant media attention on data loss, phishing and other security threats. As with all online transactions, booking a holiday is completed using SSL encryption. Obviously, customers’ details are kept securely and used only when necessary during the booking process. We are very aware of data privacy and the issues that surround this. We’ve built a secure system that customers can trust and that is simple to use.