This was a school project.

I was asked to identify a problem with an existing website and find a solution to it.

I decided to tackle Ryanair and its Fare Finder page. 

It's a great feature that allows you to book a holiday within a set budget, but without a specific destination. 

Unfortunately, many people aren't aware of its existence.

So what if the criteria to book a flight wasn't the destination, but rather the budget? After all, Ryanair is popular because of its cheap tickets.

Back in 2014, Michael O'Leary said "The fare finder facility is unique and something that passengers are responding very, very favorably to. In fact we note that one of competitors – Easyjet – recently announced their plans to copy our fare finder, but they won’t have it for a number of months yet." (You can find the article here). 

So it is clearly an important feature and yet, it's pretty well hidden. 

Here is a task flow showing the current way to get to it:

I decided to interview a few users to find out more about the way they holiday.

First, I asked "How do you usually plan your holidays? What's your main criteria when booking a flight?"

Megan, Esther, Cassie and Matthew all had similar answers: "I usually have a budget, the destination isn't that important". 

Two of them stated they first use Skyscanner to find the cheapest prices and then head on to Ryanair to book their flights (as the cheapest prices usually are with Ryanair).

I then asked them to try to book flights with no particular destination but with an €80 budget. The reactions were as follow:

- "It's very difficult, isn't it??"

- "I think there's a way to do it on Ryanair, but I don't remember how..."

One tried typing "anywhere" and "everywhere" in the search box, another tried random destinations that he thought might be cheap.

After arriving to the Fare Finder page, Alessia stated "Finally I got there, after so many clicks"

I then created two main personas: Sébastien and Elaine, both looking for the cheapest possible flights without a particular destination in mind. 

Sébastien is a broke student who tries to visit as many countries as he can, within a tight budget.

Elaine is retired and wants to surprise her husband with a trip for their 30th anniversary. She would rather spend money on a nice hotel than on flights.

In order to better understand Sébastien and Elaine's pains and needs, I created empathy maps for them.

Once I had established what needed to be fixed, I went on to ideating and sketching possible solutions.

I first added the possibility to choose Anywhere as a destination, a budget and flight dates, but that was a lot of options and I fear this solution would create a cognitive overload.

The second option was using the Fare Finder options, but it doesn't give you the possibility to add dates, which is still important for a lot of users.

The third option was inspired by Skyscanner, but it doesn't offer the possibility to enter a budget.

I had thought of removing all the ads that fill the website, but as Ryanair relies heavily on them for revenue purposes I decided to keep them.

I also considered adding the interactive map (shown below), as most of my users stated loving this feature while they were doing tests.

I first came up with the following solution, adding the option to choose "Anywhere" as a destination, and select a budget (which can be left blank).

However, I decided to go against the map which was too distracting, taking up too much space and would only decrease the website's performance.

My final solution is pretty close to what the website currently looks like: the only things that are different are being able to select "Anywhere" as a destination and choose a budget.

That way, it'll be obvious that this way of searching exists, but a user doesn't have to use it and can keep searching the "regular" way if they wish.

Because the change is so slight, it will not confuse our regular users and it should be easy to implement as it already exists elsewhere on the website.

Using Silverback, I was able to record usability testings both during the first phase (when asking them to book a flight without a destination on Ryanair's website) and during the last one, testing the prototype I had created, making sure my solution did improve the website.

Final user quote:

I did this redesign back in 2018. Ryanair has (finally) just added a feature very similar to what I've designed to their home page (we are now in 2021). 

I would love to see the metrics to find out how well it's doing!