Neilson
the booking service which provides special offers for active summer and winter holidays
Neilson is a travel agency with its own boutique hotels. The main goal of Neilson is having active holidays. Therefore, Neilson is such a unique product on the UK market. The company provides special packages for summer and winter holidays. The main activities for summer are windsurfing, tennis, kayaking and wakeboarding. For winter these are skiing and snowboarding.
CLIENT
Neilson Active Holidays

ROLE
Product Designer

TEAM
Full-stack developers, Analyst, QA specialists, Project Managers
Challenge
Summary of the main issues on the home page and the whole site: the loading of the pages takes too long, iFrame, input fields are not processed after the focus is changed, long filling of the booking and no option to save your data, Fragmented UI, No Social Proof, "Blurring" style of elements, the information is not direct and precise, a lot of similarity, lack of personalization, too many links and extra pages, no Visual Hierarchy and too many extra elements
Solution
I wanted to change it slightly, make it more juicy and fresh. Of course, cover the whole situation with raw information and technical problems that can be cover on design side.
All information that was presented on the site doesn’t fit the needs of users and customers. So that’s why it was decided to make it more precise and highlight some points. A lot of work has been done, about 30 sites with complex navigation were reviewed in order to understand how designers organise the information, control the user’s view, which things are emphasized.
Header & Search Bar
I moved the search bar to the top. I’ve spent a lot of time to explore many sites and find different design concepts to understand how it should work. It was clarified that the search bar in many cases placed near the header, and the whole team agreed with it because it is the start of the page and user can see it almost immediately. Also, the search bar that site had is much more complicated than on other sites, because our algorithm for searching holidays is connected to many fields included in this search — that is why we can’t ignore it. Another point — the search bar will be displayed in the same place that makes the process of searching more consistent.
First Fold
Next, I decided to place headline (slogan of the company), targeted offers and recommended resorts. In the block with recommended resorts I propose to show the user on the bases of cookies the range of hotels he/she already checked. It will be great if the users have quick access to these holidays.
Description & USP
The next block is the brief description of the company and its awards. It makes the company more trustworthy.
It comes with the blocks with the main lines of Neilson. A brief explanation of it can be seen by hover.
Testimonials
The main weakness of the home page was the absence of real feedback from customers. For sure that made the site less trustworthy.
Recommendations
Further there are recommendations, but this block differs from the one above, as the site already control it and can suggest the user other offers.
Subscription
There is also a subscription to the newsletter. It was decided to make a more attractive block forcing users to "dive" into the Neilson experience.
Articles
Neilson Hub (blog with selection of articles) was rebuilt completely. Adding png pictures made it look fashionable, fresh and up-to-date.
Footer
The last part is a thought-out footer. It was decided to remove anchor links to go to a specific answer and to force the user to read a bit more about common points, in order to avoid unnecessary questions. Also, I added the social network links and duplicated awards.
Below you can see several improved pages
Home page
Search results page
Accommodation page
Jobs page
Mobile
The concept for the mobile devices