Last week, we launched a redesign of Yahoo! Travel’s front page. This was an exciting project to work on, both because of it’s high visibility, and because the old design was desperately in need of some love and attention. Although it’s been written about in several blogs around the web, I think that the coolest aspects of the design aren’t all that apparent to the casual observer. So, as a member of the team, here are my thoughts about the new front page from an insider designer perspective.
Personalization
The heart of the redesign is the “Today’s Picks” module, which features personalized destination recommendations. This module uses a pretty fancy magical algorithym (a magicalgorithym) that determines quite accurately the types of places you’d be interested in going. Although something like this would ideally be combined with explicit personalization (such as being able to tell the system your likes and dislikes) I think on its own, it’s a great example of implicit personalization – using your current location, your browsing history, and some collaborative filtering to provide highly targetted content without asking for a single piece of information.
Here, the unique design challenge was in combining the richness of editorial content with the power of personalization. We made several design decisions in order to help clue the user in on the fact that these destinations are just for them. This includes inserting the user’s name into the module title if the user is logged in, showing the user’s location and allowing them to change it, as well as just referring to the destinations as recommendations in a couple different places.
So why is this so cool? More and more, online media sites are devoting a lot of space to rich, compelling photography - it’s great eye candy. But personalization takes that eye candy and turns it into something that’s actually useful. Why take up all that space with something that’s trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator? I think front pages like those on Amazon, NetFlix, and (now) Yahoo! Travel, are showing the way toward personalized experiences, and soon, generic featured content will be a thing of the past.
In addition to personalization, this module has a lot of cool functionality, including being able to mouseover each photo and access community, travel guide and weather content, without ever having to click a button. Users can also get to theme-based destination recommendations by using the “Show Me” dropdown, which updates the destinations in the module. My favorite category is the “Near Me” category, which shows great ideas for weekend trips and has a neat side-effect: if you change your location to somewhere that you plan on going but isn’t actually your home, you will get cities nearby to that location. So, if I’m planning a trip to France and want to explore cities around Paris, I could use this module to get some great ideas.
Community
The community features of this page don’t exist just for the sake of having a community. Instead, they are woven throughout, in places that make the most sense and offer the most value to the user. The flight and hotel prices in the “Today’s Picks” module are sourced from the crowd - prices that other users found on FareChase within the last 24 hours. The lists of destinations below the map are also user-generated, showing the top overall cities, the top cities this week, and - another great local aspect – the most popular cities among people in your location.
Content created by the community, including trip plans, journals and reviews, are always associated with a destination, and accessible both through the “Today’s Picks” module, as well as the “Where do you want to go” module. There, a user can enter any destination to see the lowest cached flight and hotel prices, as well content from users who have been there. This module is both personalized and configurable, which adds to its relevance. Users understand the usefulness of being able to quickly check flight and hotel prices for any destination, as well as gaining access to a community that can provide valuable, qualitative information about that destination.
Finally…
All of this, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg for what truly amazing travel site can be. The good thing is, we know that! Expect more great things from Yahoo! Travel in coming months…