Indigo Car Hire

Context

Indigo Car Hire is a Leeds-based broker. They don't own the fleet — they sit between the customer and the big rental companies, so their whole value is making a confusing market navigable. The old site did the opposite. It was a wall of text with the booking form buried at the top of a page that then ran for thousands of words. Supplier logos, category boxes, promotional panels and SEO copy all competed at the same visual weight, and none of it told you what to do next. For a business whose only job is to get someone from "I need a car" to "booked", that's an expensive problem.

Contribution

The audit. I went through the existing site and named the specific failures rather than describing it as generally dated: pages were cluttered, with everything shouting at the same volume; no clear navigation; too many exit points pulling people out of the funnel; outdated visual design; too many categories shown at once; and users felt insecure about the payment methods. That last one mattered most — it isn't an aesthetic problem, it's the reason a booking doesn't complete. Competitor research. I looked at Rentalcars, Enterprise, AVIS, Turo and Kayak and mapped strengths against weaknesses. The pattern was consistent: the big players are good at filtering and breadth, and bad at cancellation terms and eligibility. Rentalcars restricts drivers under 20. Enterprise doesn't offer drop-off in your destination area. Both AVIS and Rentalcars can raise prices when a booking is cancelled on their side. That gap became the positioning. Indigo could not beat them on fleet size, so the redesign leaned on the things they were bad at — clear refunds, flexible payment, and honest eligibility rules stated up front. Information architecture. I rebuilt the sitemap around the four hire types — car, van, bus and specialist — each following the same path: search, results, details, payment, itinerary. One repeated pattern instead of four different ones. The account area got its own branch for bookings, saved items, rewards, messages and settings. Wireframes, then UI. A full wireframe set before any visual design, then the interface built on a documented system: Roboto type scale, form states including error and success, button variants, dropdowns, popups and alerts, a full icon set, and loading animations. Alongside it, a new identity built around indigo and purple.

Constraints

• The complexity is real and can't be hidden. Car hire eligibility is genuinely complicated — deposit requirements vary by country, debit card acceptance varies by supplier, age limits differ. The old site handled this by dumping it all on the page. Deleting it wasn't an option; the information is what stops a customer arriving at a counter and being refused a car. So it had to be restructured rather than removed: deposit requirements by country as a scannable table, debit card rules as their own explained section, vehicle class guides placed where someone is choosing a vehicle rather than buried in a policy page.
• SEO content had to survive the redesign. A broker lives on search traffic. The long-form content earning that traffic couldn't be cut, so it moved below the booking flow instead of competing with it.
• Third-party supplier logos are a trust signal, not decoration. Hertz, AVIS, Sixt, Budget, Dollar, National, Alamo and Europcar all had to stay visible — they're the proof that a small Leeds broker can deliver. But on the old site they were louder than the search form, so they were restrained and repositioned rather than removed.

Key decisions

• Lead with the search form, not the sales copy. The old homepage explained the company first. The new one puts pick-up location, dates and times in the first screen, on a dark indigo band with everything else deliberately quieter. Everything the business wanted to say still exists — just below the thing the customer came to do.
• One booking pattern, four hire types. Van, car, bus and specialist all run the same search, details, payment, itinerary sequence. Consistency the user learns once, and a smaller surface to design and build.
• Answer the payment anxiety directly, in the flow. Since insecurity about payment was a named audit finding, the fix belonged in the journey rather than a policy page: refund and cancellation terms stated near the booking action, debit card rules explained where someone would ask, and deposit requirements by country available before they commit.
• Make eligibility scannable instead of shorter. Tables and structured sections beat paragraphs for this content. The reader isn't reading — they're looking for their own country, their own card, their own age bracket.
• Reviews as evidence, not decoration. Trustpilot and Google ratings kept a defined place in the layout rather than being scattered.

Outcomes

• The redesign shipped and is still live. The booking flow was rebuilt around a single repeated pattern, eligibility content restructured from paragraphs into scannable tables, and the whole thing built on a documented design system covering type, forms, buttons, dropdowns, popups, icons and animation states.
• The old-versus-new comparison is the clearest summary — same business, same information, an entirely different order of priority.