EXCEPTIONAL ALIENCASE STUDY

EXCEPTIONAL ALIEN IS A PLATFORM THAT CELEBRATES AND SHARES THE TRAVELS OF EXCEPTIONAL CREATORS.

Project Type	Website Development and application of new pages \| App Support
Shakewell’s Service	Development \| Support
Technology	Laravel \| Next Js \| React Native

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

Exceptional Alien began as a website designed to share the travel stories of creative content creators around the globe. They built a community who inspire others everyday with their creative lens on the world, and the places they love. When travelling, most people ask trusted friends to share their experiences and recommendations. Exceptional Alien collates those experiences and shares them at scale from the lens of exceptional creators.

The Exceptional Alien website was purely made up of informational content, and there was a need to expand this user experience to offer users a way that users can take action and begin their travel booking journey, without leaving the Exceptional Alien website.

After settling on a preferred travel destination, the natural next step is typically to begin searching for flights. To enable this for users, Exceptional Alien entered into a partnership with Skyscanner with the view of integrating a booking widget into their website.

SOLUTION:

We created a new set of “Destination” pages, where a user could research and read extensively about those destinations. Each destination page is a curation of the top things to do in that location, all recommended by locals. It included ‘hidden gems’, restaurants, nightlife, events, beaches, music, markets & more.
An important feature was for users to be able to easily search for relevant content and inspiration and so we implemented a filter feature, so users could filter by Food & Drink, Culture, Retail, Nature, Design, Accommodation, Wellness, Neighbourhoods, and Events.
The user can view their search results by grid, or on an interactive Map view.

We needed to enable the user to search for flight availability, without redirecting them away from the Exceptional Alien site. To deliver this, we implemented an integration with the Skyscanner widget.

The overarching challenge with this project was identified as page speeds. Given that the Exceptional Alien site is SO content heavy, it was essential that we ensured the page load speeds were as fast as possible, so that users can navigate with ease and minimal frustration.