CheckYeti
Website redesign
About CheckYeti
CheckYeti is the largest online platform to book activities in 1,000+ mountain and beach destinations across Europe – including skiing & snowboarding, rafting & canyoning, mountain biking, paragliding & ballooning, diving & surfing, jet skiing, boat trips and many more.
Overview
CheckYeti started as a business focused on booking ski lessons. As the company grew, it started to also focus on summer outdoor activities. Because the ski lesson side of the business was still the primary source of revenue, strong separation between the winter and summer seasons prevailed on the website. Once there was a large amount of summer activities offered by the company, necessity to unify the summer and winter experience has risen.
My role
I participated during all project phases with creation of flow diagrams, wireframes and prototypes, testing and logo redesign.
2. No destination pages
Based on customer research we knew that when people are searching for summer outdoor activities, this often starts with search for things to do in a certain destination instead of searching for concrete activities in a place - e.g. water sports in Dubrovnik. For the original ski lesson bookings this was not a problem since our traditional search result page accommodated sufficiently.
For summer outdoor activities this was a problem though. Each of the activities had their own “home page” and there was no page for user to compare different outdoor activities in one location.
3. Website divided into two “seasons”
The website was designed in a way which differentiated between winter (ski lessons) and summer outdoor activities. The main problem was existence of two logos, one per season. With the introduction of the new home page which integrated winter and all different summer activities we needed to address this issue.
Problems
1. No home page
When company started, focusing only on ski lesson booking, page with overview of ski lessons served as the home page. Then rafting and canyoning activities were introduced which led to creating a new home page for these activities. Other activities like paragliding, boat trips, scuba diving etc. followed, each led to creation of a respective home page due to the previous structure of the system - following the MVP approach this was the most feasible solution at the time.
Eventually there were many “home pages”, but no page with would serve as a central starting point of CheckYeti website. We needed to create such a page to accommodate for the current richer offering on the platform - to make it easier for customers to get a better overview of activities offered on the platform and for SEO purposes - to make it easier for Google to crawl out website.
Process
I started with making website flow diagrams to access the possibilities of new structure of the website. One of the problems to solve was that business side was pushing to keep strong winter branding in header for winter activities, which we of course couldn’t display for pages which didn’t contain any ski lesson related content but only summer outdoor activities.
Through these diagrams we realised the unnecessary complexity of such a solution and opted for easier solution with unified experience and header for all activities on the platform, which simplified our efforts at the time and reduced future complications dramatically.
Comparison between the solutions with unified vs differentiated branding for the seasons
I continued with creating wireframes to access effects the changes would have on navigation, how the new pages can be linked to the current structure in terms of page content and what would be the MVP of the new pages.
After understanding of the situation thanks to diagrams and wireframes I made a sketch prototype made with high fidelity mockups for all the pages to access the final experience users will have when the project is finished. I of course took the chance to modernise the website UI which affected not only the new, but in certain ways also the old pages to preserve visual consistency.
Sketch prototype of the final experience
Solution
The project successfully ended with the new home page and a page with overview of summer activities per destination which we called destination page.
New home page
New destination page
Decision to integrate the winter and summer season experience led to integrating of the two logos into one and a redesign to make the logo more legible in smaller sizes. I onboarded and received approval from the founders.
Two original logos and the new one company currently uses
The changes in navigation also led to creation of a component allowing users to search for any type of activity from anywhere on the website, both mobile and desktop.
Search pop up on mobile and desktop