Airport Website Renewal
THE CHALLENGE
The Challenge
Manchester Airports Group’s web ecosystem (serving Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports) had not been architecturally updated since 2017. Despite generating over £174m in legacy revenue across 25.6 million annual users, the platforms suffered from severe page bloat, bad performance scores, and zero mobile optimisation. While 73% of traffic was mobile, the revenue split sat at an inefficient 51% mobile / 49% desktop. The data proved a massive friction point: mobile users were visiting at scale but failing to convert due to unresponsive layouts and broken patterns.
As Head of UX, my challenge was to overhaul this multi-channel digital gateway, mandate strict accessibility compliance, future-proof the commercial engine, and build a testing infrastructure that turned user insights into immediate revenue growth.
ROLE
Head of UX
Spearheaded the design strategy, cross-brand architecture, and design system governance for the complete three-airport web renewal. Directed the end-to-end UX/UI transformation, establishing the unified global component library, implementing tokenization parameters to manage multi-brand scaling, managing the continuous research program, and founding the cross-functional Optimizely growth optimisation squad.
The Approach
Data-Driven System Evolution: Formed an intentional testing cadence across the full lifecycle—validating early design frameworks on East Midlands Airport (EMA) first, then scaling systematically to London Stansted (STN) and Manchester Airport (MAN).
Component Tokenisation & Agility: Designed a unified “source of truth” component and page template library in Figma and the CMS. I introduced full design tokenisation to the project, which allowed the team to absorb a sudden, massive London Stansted brand overhaul seamlessly without losing a single day of design or development momentum.
Empirical User Testing: Deployed a relentless mixed-methods testing program via UserTesting.com to map legacy frustration points (unresponsive controls, buried parking information) and rigorously benchmark the accessibility and usability of the new layouts.
Rigorous Growth Architecture: Set up a dedicated, cross-functional conversion squad utilising Optimizely to institutionalise a continuous A/B testing culture aimed at driving users seamlessly into our core commercial booking funnels.
The Impact
Conversion Optimisation Hit: Smashed our £400k target for FY26 with a single, high-performing early A/B test sequence.
50%+ Content Reduction: Condensed bloated architectural frameworks by eliminating redundant, custom-coded legacy pages in favour of highly optimised global components.
Validated Usability Gains: Achieved elite benchmarks on new System Usability Scale (SUS) evaluations, validating that the platform drastically decreased cognitive load while expanding multi-device access.
The Baseline: The Legacy 2024 Blueprint
To fully understand the commercial scale of this transformation, we analysed a full year of baseline data from the legacy, unoptimised 2017 platforms:
Annual Users
Total Revenue
Annual Users
Total Revenue
Annual Users
Total Revenue
Key Design Pillars
01 / Commercial Personalisation & Mobile Optimisation:
Redesigned the core conversion pathways around mobile-first behaviors. By introducing responsive components, sticky interaction behaviors, and modern navigation structures, we directly addressed the friction driving the mobile drop-off rate, paving the way for targeted CRO and dynamic, personalized customer experiences.
02 / Complete Architectural Efficiency:
Future-proofed the CMS ecosystem by creating a comprehensive suite of flexible, atomic design components. This transformed our content team from grid-builders into experience curators—allowing them to launch high-quality landing pages instantly without dev input, while enforcing strict SLAs regarding assets, file sizes, and unified naming conventions.
03 / Uncompromising Inclusivity:
Fused classic UX heuristics seamlessly with deep accessibility guidelines. The entire UI framework was engineered from the ground up to achieve excellent Lighthouse scores and meet the elite WCAG AA standard, ensuring that every passenger—regardless of technical literacy, device type, or physical ability—has an exceptional browsing experience.
The Discovery Phase: Validating with Direct User Data
We structured our delivery timeline to iterate sequentially, launching East Midlands Airport (EMA) first, followed by London Stansted (STN), and finally Manchester Airport (MAN). Nothing was shipped based on guesswork; everything was built on quantitative event data and qualitative behavioral validation.
The Power of Tokenisation
Midway through scaling the design system from EMA to London Stansted, STN announced a complete brand overhaul. In a traditional environment, a mid-project rebrand stalls product momentum for months.
However, because we introduced design tokens into our global Figma component libraries, we simply mapped the new STN visual properties (colours, typography scales, style values) directly into our atomic components. The entire platform updated systematically overnight. We absorbed a complete corporate rebrand without losing a single day of development velocity.
Deep-Dive User Testing: Locating Friction & Benchmarking Success
Our mixed-methods evaluation program tracked the experience across hundreds of sessions, identifying systemic problems on legacy structures and systematically validating the updated design system.
Phase 1: Diagnosing Legacy Core Friction Points
Before writing a line of code, we ran extensive moderated and unmoderated usability benchmarking sessions to pinpoint why the old platforms were experiencing significant drop-offs:
Functional Ambiguity: Users routinely struggled with unoptimized navigation elements, unresponsive layout components, and broken device gestures.
High Cognitive Load: Legacy systems felt overly complex and awkward, causing several participants to state they felt they would need dedicated support just to finish a standard transaction.
Buried Information Architecture: Critical pieces of context—such as granular parking durations, price comparisons, and accessible travel help options—were obscured by heavy layouts, leaving travelers feeling anxious during booking phases.
Phase 2: System Validation & Benchmarking
As components transitioned from Figma mockups to live code environments on the DXP framework, we ran continuous target validation studies (including Tree Testing, Preference Testing, and System Usability Scale tracking):
Tree Testing (STN & EMA): We ran focused layout studies with isolated user groups to confirm that our newly simplified navigation taxonomy eliminated structural dead-ends.
Preference and Usability Tests: Validated critical interaction blocks like the EMA Hero Copy, the Booking Widget layout, and specific Commercial Component variations across both mobile and desktop viewports before shipping to production.
The Verdict: Post-launch testing confirmed an exceptional reception. Users described the updated platform as highly accessible, clean, and superior to competing international airport sites. Crucially, the data showed significant improvements in locating security wait times, assisted travel alternatives, and parking options.
Continuous Optimisation
To convert user insights into sustainable revenue growth, we institutionalised an agile growth framework. We established a dedicated conversion squad utilising Optimizely to target key friction points along our primary commercial funnels.
Our core mandate for the fiscal year was to scale referral rates directly into our booking engines, with a strict target of generating £400k in incremental value for FY26.
Some key A/B tests deployed are:
CTA Copy Micro-Optimisations:
Hypothesis: By clarifying each service offering through benefit-led microcopy, users can quickly understand the purpose and value of each product, increasing CTR on the product tiles. Clearer differentiation from the parking booking widget also makes the parking option more obvious, reducing confusion and increasing parking widget CTR.
USP Pills within the Parking Table:
Hypothesis: By adding USP pills to two items within the comparison table, giving them greater visual prominence than the other options, users will be able to identify key differentiators more quickly. This will aid decision-making, increase confidence in selecting an option, and ultimately drive more users into the booking funnel.
Booking Widget CTA Copy:
Hypothesis: By replacing the ’Book Now’ widget CTA with less committal messaging, such as ’Compare Prices’, ’Get a Quote’, or ’Check Availability’, users will perceive less pressure at the point of interaction. This will reduce hesitation at the research stage, encourage more users to enter the booking funnel, and increase CTR from the booking widget.
Outcomes & Strategic Impact
Smashed Growth Targets: Proved design’s direct impact on commercial metrics by exceeding our annual £400k revenue optimisation KPI within the first quarter.
50%+ Structural Asset Reduction: Tidied the CMS footprint by cutting more than half of the legacy pages, drastically reducing internal content maintenance and technical bloat.
Data-Driven Foundations Ready: Successfully deployed a clean, optimised event-tracking framework, eliminating old tag bloat, accelerating page performance, and opening up testing capabilities for future growth.
Improved System Usability Scale (SUS) scores: All three legacy sites originally scored 60 out of 100 (marginal), however after relaunch all three websites are in scoring 80+ (excellent).