1,803+
trips booked
£5,845,197+
orders placed
About Jagged Globe
Since 1987, Jagged Globe has been planning, organising and leading mountaineering expeditions and courses, backcountry skiing and high-altitude treks.
Jagged Globe was the first British company to organise a professionally-led expedition to Everest and continues to develop innovative trips to mountains worldwide.
The Challenge
After taking over the site, we made many incremental improvements, securing the site with an SSL so that it all ran over the encrypted HTTPS protocol, updating password encryption to modern standards, taking payments for trips online (using SagePay) and moving the entire site to a server with PCI standard security.
Once security was up to date, the client wished to work on their checkout.
Getting clients up an 8,000-metre peak is complicated and requires considerable due diligence before booking. Before Jagged Globe are prepared to take a climber to such a hostile environment, their competence as a climber and overall health must be appraised and approved. Detailed questionnaires must be completed.
For a new method of booking trips online, we needed to meet the following challenges:
Acceptance of Terms & Conditions
Climbing the great peaks can never be made entirely safe. For a trip to be an adventure, a certain amount of exposure, a degree of risk and even significant discomfort are all inevitable.
Before a client could even start to check out, a set of rigorous terms and conditions would need to be accepted.
‘Friction’ Needed to be Minimised
The processes that interrupt the checkout process and distract the user from checking out are referred to as ‘friction’ – this needed to be minimised. Everyone’s time is pressured, so where information was known of a customer, it shouldn’t be asked twice
Clarify the Process
Whilst the interface needed to be as simple as possible, many options affect the final price – single room, departure point, trip extensions and so on. At all stages, the customer needed to be aware of both what they needed to put on their credit card immediately and what would need to be paid before they set foot on the mountain.
The Solution
No client we have ever worked with has such a demanding set of strictures to their booking. This required a sophisticated custom build.
What Did Little Fire Digital Do?
Before we typed a line of code (any fool can clatter away at a keyboard), we went through a process of defining the brief with the client – a process which took days.
Improved the Checkout Flow
We couldn’t eliminate the “terms and conditions” step entirely. But we turned it into a part of the process, the styling matches the rest of the checkout, and signposting is clear. The user knows why they are there, what they are there for and how it fits into the checkout.
Got Rid of Registration
Before this update, a user was required to: complete a registration form; validate their email address; log in … and then check out – significant friction. We built a form which could register a user as they checked out.
Simplified Data Entry
If a user with a known email checks out, they are prompted for their password. If both can be validated, the checkout form is completed automatically (as far as possible) from the Jagged Globe database. Only a new user needs to work through the entire booking form – and even then, only the once.
Built in GDPR Compliance
The user needs to acknowledge the information they are submitting and grant explicit permission for Jagged Globe to use it for both themselves and any other user for whom they book.
What Else Did Little Fire Digital Do?
Kept the Customer Informed
We built a small console with a summary of the booking, dates, departure points, options chosen and so on. This follows the client down the page as they work their way through the process. Thus keeping them updated as to the deposit to be paid immediately and the final balance due at all times.
This widget also contains the submit button. Once enough data has been captured on the form – the button becomes live – and the customer can immediately make payment.
Captured Abandoned Checkouts
We built a system that would remind customers who leave during the checkout process that their booking is still ‘live’ and offering them a link back to complete it. If the client does not return, after two days, all data relating to it is deleted.
Kept Everything Simple
The customer is never presented with more interface than they need to complete the booking. Although the system permits a booking for up to four people, until the customer asks to do so, the form fields for extra users are never presented.
Anything Else?
Made it All Hang Together
Jagged Globe don’t just accept bookings from all the website but all bookings are managed by users on the website.
New bookings from this new process needed to integrate with those already on the Jagged Globe database.
Tested, Tested, Tested
With so many variables, such a large project required rigorous testing – unit testing of each process and sub-process throughout. Mountaineers are an individualistic lot, the range of devices against which we had to test was large. But we used BrowserStack to enable us to do so on the platforms to which we had no physical access.
Made it Mobile
Although complex, we ensured that the entire booking process could be completed on a mobile phone. In the process, we made the entire website meet the Google ‘mobile-friendly’ standard.
The Outcome
It’s been a while, but we just checked. To book a trip costing thousands of pounds, an existing customer at Jagged Globe can go from look at a trip and pay for it in four clicks. That’s right, one checkbox and two short text fields (email and password).
Einstein is credited with the quote: “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler”
We reckon we got close.
Need to Ease Your Customers’ Journey?
If you think about it, you probably do. Talk to us, we‘re good at this.