User Interface Design and Guidelines for Travel Websites

We re-designed the user interface and developed user interface guidelines for use across all Amadeus's consumer facing products.

Amadeus provides customised IT solutions for the travel industry which meet both the client's business objectives and the users' requirements.  They aim to develop products that provide a great user experience and System Concepts supplies them with user experience services to help them achieve this objective.   

Amadeus has a wide range of business to consumer (B2C) products which allow consumers to book and manage their travel arrangements online.  To ensure a consistently good user experience across all of their products, Amadeus decided to introduce user interface (UI) guidelines for all their B2C products.  Designers, developers and product managers will benefit from:

• Improved usability and accessibility
• Increased consistency
• Improved efficiency and effectiveness of the development process.

The starting point for the guidelines was a website which allows the end customer to search for and purchase different travel products including flight, hotel and car.  The guidelines will then be used in the development of future B2C products.

Following a User Centred Design (UCD) approach we took the following steps to produce the guidelines:

1. Requirements gathering

We started by gathering the requirements of the stakeholders of the UI guidelines.  Interviewing product managers, developers and designers from different B2C departments gave us a comprehensive insight into their expectations of the guidelines.

2. Usability evaluation

As the guidelines would be based on a specific B2C product, we first evaluated its usability by conducting an expert review and a competitor review.  The Amadeus team updated their current site using our recommendations from these reviews.  We then conducted a user test with eight users on the updated design.

3. Designing the UI and creating the guidelines

Based on the results from the expert review, competitor review and user test, we created wireframes – skeletal frameworks without a visual design – of the web pages that would be part of the guidelines.  Taking into account best practice, usability standards and our experience with user interface design, we then compiled guidelines regarding the overall layout, content and navigation as well as guidelines specific to certain user interface components.

4. Evaluating the designs and guidelines

Following a UCD process, we conducted design iterations which were reviewed with the Amadeus team, other usability experts as well as end users.  To ensure the wireframes and guidelines would build the basis for truly usable products, we developed an interactive prototype that could be used for another round of user testing.  We updated the designs and guidelines following the results of these tests.

5. Maintaining the guidelines

We delivered the guidelines to the Amadeus team who uploaded them to their intranet.  Here every member of the international team can access the latest version the UI guidelines.  As a next step we recommended gathering feedback from the stakeholders of the guidelines to make sure their requirements are met. 
In the long term these guidelines will be extended to other B2C products, with further chapters added and guidelines reviewed to ensure they are based on the latest developments in web technology, design and the travel industry.

Throughout the process we worked closely with the Amadeus team, making sure we understood the existing system design and underlying business models when developing the UI guidelines.

What does the client say?

System Concepts' usability project for e-Power's B2C booking engine has helped us to grow customer satisfaction.  Implementing their recommendations helps travellers to navigate more easily through the travel websites and travel agents have benefited from an increased conversion rate.

System Concepts continues to work with Amadeus in Europe, Asia and North America helping them to define and design interfaces which provide an efficient, effective and satisfying user experience.

Read how we helped Amadeus develop new graphical interfaces for their travel agent booking systems.