Project background

We were tasked by Chester Zoo to improve their donations and Gift Aid conversions through their ticket booking system. They had recently carried out some technical updates and overhauled their booking system, but seen some significant drop off's in donations.

UX Analysis

An in-depth UX review was carried out to identify common friction points and areas for improvement. This involved the following:

• Competitor research

• Heatmap analysis

• Session recording analysis

• Moderated usability testing

Key findings:

• Donations & Gift Aid - There was a big disparity between users and their knowledge of Gift Aid and donations. Some users thought Gift Aid was an additional charge to them on top of the regular donation and therefore were not willing to "donate" twice. On the other hand, some users understood the donation process but considered it to be "too expensive" on top of the ticket price.

• Checkout Process - Numerous friction points were found during the checkout process including:

  • Broken labels on form fields

  • Fields did not auto-fill increasing time to completion

  • Lack of payment options like Apple pay or Google pay

  • Basket could not be altered

Solutions

• Donation amount was displayed per ticket to minimise the perceived expense.

• A modal was added to introduce users to Gift Aid that had donated, emphasising that it came at no cost to the user.

• This modal was also re-used for non-donating users to promote them to reconsider donating, therefore allowing them to give Gift Aid.

• Bigger emphasis was put on "guest checkout" to improve checkout speed and reduce friction for users.

• Ability to amend orders from checkout was introduced.

• Auto-filling fields were added.

• Additional payment options were added, including Apple pay and Google pay.

• Updates to the order confirmation page were made to promote account creation as well as re-direct to alternative donation options.

Results

We tracked the performance of these changes over 30 days as well as conducted follow up usability testing, and observed the following changes:

• Donations had increased by 12%

• Gift Aid donations had increased by 18%

• User frustration was significantly reduced throughout journey

• User drop-off at payment stage significantly reduced

• Average journey time was decreased by 1:20