Contest design - Part 3 of Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite

Part 2 of this series told the story of how we iterated over the visual design of Cleartrip's My Purpose microsite. This part describes the design of the contest & user-flows.

What's in it for me?

Sharing holidays pics, party pics, and status updates on Facebook/Twitter has become part of a person's online identity. Because of the network effect – the (almost) omni-presence of one's friends on such networks – a person wants to share bits of his/her life online.

It would be naive to expect users to find such a value through our campaign microsite – in all of 4-weeks. We were asking users to share personal travel experiences with us, without giving them anything tangible or intangible in return.

We took an easy route to fill this gap – a contest.

Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite - Part 2

Part 1 of this series detailed the overall context of Cleartrip's TV campaign and the thought that went into outlining the online strategy for it. With just 12 days for the ads to go on-air we had to get our heads down and focus on execution – starting from the visual design of the microsite.

Visual & interaction design

Truth be told, no design process is linear. In a textbook world every process fits into a neat diagram like this.

In the real world, it's more like this.

Courtesy: The Anatomy of Web Design

Fresh off the block

And that's precisely what happened with this microsite. The brilliant chaps at Synapse, our digital agency based in Goa, got all charged-up. They spent the weekend working off a half-baked brief based around a bunch of ideas that we had been bouncing off each other.

One of the first mockups of the microsite looked something like this.

While it drew inspiration from the right products & tried to neatly package the ideas that we had bounced off each other, this approach didn't work for mainly two reasons:

Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite - Part 1

Inception

Online travel as a category is extremely cluttered. MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Yatra, Travelocity, TravelGuru, iXiGO, goIbibo, Aarzoo - the list just doesn't seem to end. Marketing communication for online travel is even more cluttered & undifferentiated. Each & every player is talking about essentially the same things - deals, cashbacks, & discounts. It's a race to the bottom to be the place for cheapest deals.

Given this competitive environment, Cleartrip wanted to go out with a fresh communication to break this clutter. We wanted to take a more "human" approach with our communication. Something that connects with customers at a level "higher" than prices & discounts.

With this background & brief, we called for agency pitches to create our TV commercial. I sat through all the pitches. Some were good. Some not so. But, the one that we finally went with, had a brilliant insight - every trip has a purpose. Think about it. Travel is more about meeting your relatives, going for your honeymoon, or clinching that business deal than it's about the price you bought the ticket for. As a travel service provider, we enable our customers to fulfill an actual purpose. To quote Hrush from the Cleartrip blog: