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The importance of mobile web design for travel companies
Thursday, 03 Oct, 2018
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There is an old and widely-accepted wisdom: don’t make it difficult for your customers to do business with you.
Why This Matters
CSI Media, experts in travel website design know that travel companies typically prefer that their branding has a congruency across multiple customer touchpoints.
For perhaps a century, if you went into one high street travel agent you expected its materials and processes to be broadly similar to another branch of the same organisation in a different town.
However, with 21st century technology, that’s not always easy to achieve.
Let’s consider the size of a typical smartphone screen and compare this with the size of a desktop PC. There is clearly a substantial difference in size, and the way human psychology reacts to the presence of information varies hugely depending upon how it is presented to them.
So the challenge for web designers is to try and ensure that the look and feel of a travel company’s website, and the presentation of holiday packages, is as near identical as possible.
To put it bluntly, your potential customers do not want to have to do things significantly differently depending on which device they happen to choose to access your site through.
Re-conceptualising Your Website
The above challenge isn’t quite as easy to deal with as it might appear.
Clearly, it’s possible to get far more information on a larger screen than a smaller one. If you design your customer interface with a large screen in mind and then simply make it available to smart phone devices by shrinking the page in size terms, you are likely to end up with text and information on the phone that is far too small.
Most of us also know that the experience of scrolling endlessly down a page on a smartphone is, well, the word "frustrating" comes to mind!
A more scientific design approach adopted by top travel website designers is to re-conceive your proposition for electronic channels, taking into account not just the devices involved but also the psychological processes taking place with your customer. It’s necessary to ask questions such as:
• what information is essential for a customer to see;
• when do they need to see it in terms of information flows;
• where do they need to see it on the screen to encourage desirable actions?
• what are the real priorities for customers when engaging with you electronically?
It really involves far more than simply shrinking a screen that was originally designed for the desktop PC or Mac!
Getting It Right First Time
For travel website designers, the above re-design and engineering process is critically important.
If it doesn’t take place, there is a risk that travel companies will deliver different looks and experiences to customers on different devices. Equally a prototyping approach, whereby your design seems to change every week, can also be off-putting in terms of customer experience.
That is why it is important to have a design at the outset that accommodates all devices and which rethinks the fundamental nature of how you need to engage with your prospective clients on the web.
Visit CSI Media to find out how they can help your travel company.
CSI Media
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