As most in the e-commerce industry know, the usability of your site is critical to driving conversion. In fact, as recent research from Forrester shows, sites with well-designed user experiences can convert visits at rates as high as 400%.
But what steps can we take to push conversion and drive stickiness earlier in the customer journey? Whilst by no means an exhaustive list, we’ve identified a few optimisations to help your users convert early and often.
1. Contextualised search
For the large online retailer, search can be key to keeping users on your site. When you have hundreds of diverse products, guiding users to the right or relevant product by keyword becomes more complicated. And while it may seem obvious, Baymard Institute’s third benchmark analysis in the past five years revealed surprisingly “weak support for essential search query types” with 61% performing below their standards.
For contextualised search, we should focus on the “query structure”, which determines how the search engine interprets the query. Whilst sites may perform well in exact query matching, implicit searches (i.e. when a shopper forgets qualifiers, such as “women’s” in a search for “shirts”) and symbol, abbreviation (i.e. replacing centimetre with “cm”) or synonym searches are all stumbling blocks for search engines. When we optimise the search results to the context of the user’s query – that is to say, configure the search engine to account for forms of non-exact query matching – we can generate search results contextualised to the user’s query. Taking this a step further, we can further optimise for the user’s context (e.g. location, gender, etc.) and display relevant search results. For example, the same key phrase might yield different results for different markets: the screen capture on the right shows results for a shopper in Germany (where CUBE is the name of a popular bike manufacturer), whilst the shopper on the left is in the UK.
Search results for “cube” in the UK (left). Search results for “cube” in Germany (right).
2. Eliminating scrolling fatigue
A recent study published by Google found that “scrolling fatigue” was the main concern of shoppers in the exploration stage, as “endless scroll” contributes to time-wasting and monotonous shopping experiences. While the pain point is somewhat irrelevant for relatively small product inventories, enabling users to navigate search results easily will have a definitive impact on conversion. The same study found that in Norway’s electronics industry, “scrolling fatigue” represents a barrier to a potential 15.5% incremental conversion uplift on mobile, and, in Northern Europe, a barrier to 5.1% in the personal care and beauty industry.
We can cut down on time spent browsing in a variety of ways. First, we can help the user exit the scroll quickly by implementing a sticky menu with a search bar that doesn’t disappear as the shopper scrolls down. Second, we can help the user find where they are in the listings by adding components like progress bars or the number of items loaded and total results. Both of these simple design enhancements would improve how a user navigates product content without involving personalisation or contextualisation.
3. Personalised product recommendations
Suppose you did want to take it a step further. Whether your inventory holds 200 or 10,000 products, enabling personalised product recommendations can speed up the exploration stage of the customer journey by surfacing relevant options earlier, and in some cases can be more effective in some scenarios than standardised filtering.
More importantly, recommendation carousels on your product pages can be instrumental to your upselling and cross-selling. Research conducted by Monetate in 2018 found that online shoppers “who engaged with a recommended product had a 70% higher conversion rate” during their initial browsing session.
Adidas recommended products carousel.
Most retailers today are familiar with the benefits of personalisation: the Netflix and Amazon shopping experiences have served as exemplary models for several years now. Furthermore, personalisation tools have grown in availability and intelligence, enabling e-commerce sites of any size to take advantage of what was once the boon of large retailers.
4. Influential product information
A slightly more obvious way to speed up the customer journey is to surface as much information about your product as possible, without overloading your UI. There are a few simple components which help consumers make the final purchase decision.
Firstly, the user needs to know that the product is available. When a user is browsing your products, they are still exploring your product range and may still be comparing your offering to other vendors. In order to drive users to convert, “low stock” alerts on the product results page can help keep users informed about the availability of the product and drive them to convert faster. In a “quickview” of the product, you could surface other information that influences the buying decision – such as pre-calculating the total costs when applying promo codes or one-day shipping- and allow your customers the option of an easy add-to-basket flow.
Some components may also have a greater impact on conversion rates in different industries. For example, in fashion, additional prompts such as a size charts or AR modules to “see how it fits” can help push the buying decision.
Takeaway
These areas of optimisation should indicate the breadth of enhancements and design choices you can make which directly impact the buyer decision. More importantly, each optimisation directly correlates to a user benefit, which ultimately drives engagement rates.
What underpins each optimisation, however, is the need to validate and refine each component with design iterations and experimentation. Our team of in-house eCommerce experts can help you leverage best-in-class AI personalisation tools, as well as design and optimise retail experiences that meet your user needs – get in touch with us to learn more about what makes a well-designed e-commerce experience.
The average airline web portals is not broken. It loads, it sells tickets. It technically does what it's supposed to do.
And yet, the experience feels tiring.
You notice it when you try to do something simple. Change a seat. Find your gate. Understand what happens if a flight is delayed. Suddenly you are scanning long pages, decoding airline terminology, clicking back and forth just to stay oriented.
The problem is not with the features, It is effort effort required in getting from A to B.
Airline portals still expect travellers to think like systems. To understand menus, categories, fare families, ancillaries, rules. But travellers arrive with something much simpler. Intent.
They want to get something done and get on with their journey.
This article posits that airline web portals should stop behaving like navigation systems and start acting as intent-aware decision environments. When UX is designed to reduce effort, adapt to context, and quietly support travellers at each stage of the journey, portals become calmer to use, easier to trust, and far more effective for airlines.
The basics still matter more than airlines think
Before talking about AI or personalisation, it is worth being honest about the fundamentals.
You can see that accessibility standards aren’t yet being applied and portals aren’t optimised for mobile, which results in performance drops. Navigation feels heavier than it needs to be. Search often works, but only if you already know what to ask and how the airline expects you to ask it.
These are not exciting topics, but they shape everything that comes after. If a portal is slow, confusing, or inaccessible, no amount of intelligence layered on top will fix the experience.
At Branchspace, we see this repeatedly. Airlines want to move faster, personalise more, experiment. But the UX foundation is not always ready to support that ambition.
Where portals lose traveller trust
The biggest UX issues are rarely dramatic, they are subtle and cumulative:
- A vague error message that offers no next step
- A long paragraph that hides the one thing the traveller needs to know
- Three different words for the same concept depending on where you are in the journey
- A mobile page that technically works but feels endless
In isolation these are small instances, but they compound to create friction for a user. And friction erodes confidence.
Travellers begin to hesitate, scan more carefully, and spend extra effort just trying to stay oriented. They stop trusting that the portal will help them when things go wrong. Good UX goes beyond delight, it is about reassurance.
Decision-making is the real job of UX
Every airline portal is a decision-making environment:
- Choose a flight
- Choose a fare
- Choose a seat
- Decide whether to rebook or wait
The role of UX is not to present all options equally. It is to reduce the mental work required to choose well.
That is where simple principles matter more than flashy ideas: clear visual hierarchy, familiar patterns, plain language, and progressive disclosure.
When these are done properly, travellers stop analysing the interface and start moving confidently through it.
This is also where intent-led thinking becomes powerful. When portals are designed around tasks rather than pages, complexity begins to fall away naturally.
What changes when you design for intent
When you stop designing for navigation and start designing for intent, the portal behaves differently:
- Shift the focus to intent and the portal begins to respond in new ways
- Search leads the experience rather than sitting in the background
- Logged-in travellers with an upcoming trip see what they can do next, instead of being asked to explore
This is the direction we have been taking with platforms like Triplake by allowing the portal to respond to context, trip stage, loyalty status and behaviour.
Where AI actually helps and where it should stay quiet
AI has a role in airline UX, but it works best when it stays in the background rather than taking centre stage. The strongest AI-driven experiences are often the ones you barely notice, because the interface feels simpler and the path forward feels clearer.
That might mean routing a traveller straight to the right outcome based on a natural language query, or surfacing the most relevant rebooking option when a disruption occurs. In other moments, it is about removing repetition altogether, using known preferences to spare travellers from making the same choices again and again.
At its best, AI offers clarity, supports decisions without trying to make them on the traveller’s behalf. People still want to feel in control of their journey, they just do not want to work so hard to get there.
The portal is becoming a living interface
The most interesting shift we are seeing has very little to do with technology and everything to do with behaviour. Airline portals are gradually moving away from being static websites and towards adaptive interfaces that respond to where a traveller is in their journey.
Before the trip, the portal helps you prepare. On the day of travel, it shifts into a supportive role, surfacing the information that matters most in the moment. Afterwards, it follows up, closing the loop rather than simply ending the experience.
Making this work demands modular design systems, flexible platforms, and teams that think beyond individual pages and flows. It is not an easy change, but it is both achievable and increasingly necessary.
