trivago Magazine

trivago Magazine is a website whose homepage is a stack of content modules, each acting as an entry point into a full article, followed by related articles. The brief: propose an evolution of the homepage experience that aligns desktop and mobile.

The interesting tension is commercial. A magazine attached to a hotel search engine exists to create intent, but the version I audited gave inspired readers almost nothing to do with that intent.

Two of the five phases are honest gaps. I had no access to trivago’s users or analytics, so the research plan below is written as a plan, not dressed up as findings.

I started where it is cheapest to start: a structured walk of the live homepage using Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics as the checklist. Naming the heuristic each time keeps the review from becoming a list of personal preferences.

I then tested six competitors hands-on, four direct and two indirect, and summarised each on the strengths and weaknesses axes of a SWOT. The point was positioning: where does a hotel comparison engine’s magazine sit between a booking site’s content arm and an actual travel magazine?

This is the part of the process I could not execute, and I would rather show the plan than pretend I had the data.

With the audit findings in hand I wrote the requirements as user stories: short statements of who wants what and why. They are the bridge between a list of complaints and a page structure, and they are testable later.

Paper first. Squared paper, one module per block, so that rearranging the page costs nothing and the argument stays about sequence rather than styling.

The remaining phases were planned, not run. In order: build a low-fidelity clickable prototype and test it with the same people interviewed earlier, assessing navigation and content clarity; correct the prototype and iterate until the errors stop appearing; only then define the interface, working from what the audit demanded (more colour, genuine calls to action, tags that look like tags); finally, a functional mockup and a last pass of testing before handover.

Written out like this it looks tidy. In practice the second iteration is where the structure usually breaks, which is exactly why I would not skip ahead to visual design.

The audit and the benchmark are still work I would defend. Naming the heuristic behind each finding is what made the recommendations arguable rather than decorative.

What I’d change is the ambition. I redesigned an entire homepage when the commercial problem was one module, the search band. Today I would scope this as a single measurable change, propose it as an experiment with a defined success metric, and keep the full-page redesign as the follow-up if the experiment paid. I would also stop writing “the user” in user stories: without personas behind them, that phrase quietly means “me”.