Challenge

The site-wide search dropdown displayed results from all search indexes (cruises, destinations, FAQs, pages) with equal visual weighting, regardless of relevance to the majority of user intent. Results were missing key supporting information, making it hard to judge relevance at a glance. The mobile experience was significantly more limited than desktop, showing only text-based results from a single index, with no rich product information at all.

Customer journey mapping work had already flagged search as an underserved part of the discovery experience, and this was reinforced by moderated user testing and interviews, which showed users struggling to find cruise-relevant results quickly, particularly on mobile.

Process

Research and Analysis

• • Agency-led research: I briefed an external agency partner on a user testing project covering the online search journey. They conducted journey analysis and moderated testing, then reported back a full review of findings.
  • Managing the partnership: I owned the brief and the relationship end-to-end, ensuring the research stayed focused on the right questions and that findings translated into concrete design decisions rather than sitting in a report.
  • Key findings: The lack of prioritisation between search indexes and missing product detail (price, departure port) were confirmed as the main barriers to users finding relevant results quickly — grounding the redesign in real user problems backed by data and insight, not assumption.
  • Session recordings: I reviewed real users interacting with the dual-dropdown pattern to understand where confusion originated.

Design

• Based on those findings, I rebuilt the dropdown to prioritise cruise results, enrich listings with the same level of detail used elsewhere on site, and bring mobile up to parity with desktop.

Solution

Results

Key takeaways

• Bringing mobile search up to parity with desktop unlocked a large share of the improvement — the previous mobile experience had been silently suppressing product discovery.

• Enriching results with the same detail used elsewhere on the site (price, departure port) reduced the gap between “finding” and “trusting” a result.

• As a lean, in-house team of one, the right agency partnership for research can accelerate decision-making and bridge in-house resource gaps.