Case study test: Redesigning the landing page for Qatar Airways

Introduction

Qatar Airways is the national airline of Qatar headquartered in Doha. As a major global carrier, it connects over 150 destinations worldwide through its hub at Hamad International Airport. The airline is renowned for its high-quality service, especially in premium classes, and has received numerous industry awards.

My Role

I am the product designer for this project. This is a test case study that I submitted for screening.

The Goal

Discover

Allow travelers to easily explore destinations, flight options, and special offers, this will help increase the chances of booking.

Awareness

Highlights the airline's unique features, routes, and services to differentiate from competitors and build trust with consumers.

Easy Navigation

Streamlining the flight search and booking process, this will reduce abandonment rates and guide users smoothly from initial search to final ticket purchase.

Challenge

The first step I did is identifying the usability of the site. This leads me to using competitive analysis to provide an insight how the competitors are designing their solutions.

I used SWOT Analysis to determine the strengths and weaknesses, and feature comparison to the direct competitors. Here is a high level outlook on my process. You can read more about competitive analysis in this article from HubSpot.

During the competitive analysis, I found a lot of usability issues from the landing page as compared to the direct competitors. With that, biggest issues involved are visual inconsistencies and information architecture.

Next, I did a design audit using the 7 guiding principles, and grouped all the issues that I found. I then ranked the issues using heuristic evaluation scoring and grouped the issues found into different severity. You can read more about this process for a similar project I did in 2020 here.

Once the issues were sorted, I went and addressed the issues that had highest severity and included it in the final design. Some of the low concern issues that were nitpicked are presented to the stakeholders as something that can be fixed and easily.

Solutions

Here are some of the features that I worked on for the landing page:

Book & manage flight widget

Problem

For the Qatar Stopover widget, the information inside is redundant because it's similar to the default book a flight option.

Solution

Move the stopover option to the default state of the widget.

Why this works?

I strategically placed the stopover option in the default view of the widget. This design decision increases its visibility and reduces clicks, naturally making the user curious and encourages exploration. By bringing it to the default, it aims to boost user engagement.

Menu bar information architecture

Problem

The current separation of flight booking and experience options in the information architecture increases user effort and potentially reduce engagement with all available travel options.

Solution

Integrate popular options, promotions, and booking experience into the booking tab to create a more cohesive and personalized user experience.

Why this works?

This integrated approach streamlines the user journey, increases visibility of all offerings, allows for personalized recommendations, reduces cognitive load, and aligns with typical trip planning behavior.