Home landing: Search UX Enhancement
Hypothesis
If we test a similar change on our home landing pages as tested, then our conversion metric will likely improve based on their implementation decision.
Test Results
Key Learning
Problem: Each additional form field adds friction to the home landing, increasing the chance users abandon before completing their submission.
What worked: implemented this UI change (Feb 25, 2020). Implementation suggests positive internal results
Takeaway: Even small lifts compound — across thousands of sessions, this adds up. Navigation improvements affect every page — measure downstream engagement and conversion to understand the full impact.
How to Apply This to Your Site
This experiment demonstrated that home landing: search ux enhancement can improve conversions. The test was run on a landing page page in the travel industry.
Before you test: Consider that navigation tests typically require adequate traffic to reach statistical significance. Run your test for at least 2 full business cycles to account for weekly traffic patterns.
What Was Tested
In this experiment Booking added a second search bar on their homepage. The intention might have been to provide users a way to filter more destinations by country. Could this scenario have created an akward uncertainty about which form field to engage with? Whether this explanation is true or not, I'm not sure. What we do know however that in the end, the control version with the single search bar prevailed.
Methodology
Build On These Learnings
Save your own experiments, spot winning patterns across your test history, and stop repeating what's already been tried.
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