Brief
The brief was to redesign the website for holiday camp operators Butlins.
Butlins’ previous site was several years old and it’s design, structure and content were seen as being too cartoon-esque and no longer reflective of their brand image or their target audience’s expectations.
Furthermore, content had been added over a number of years and the clarity of the navigation and the general information architecture had become lost, and the website was failing to convert site visitors into customers.
Research & Implementation
A full content audit of their existing site was undertaken, and stakeholder interviews were carried out in order to understand the business’ core offerings and the marketplace within which it operated.
Competitor analysis was done to help identify best-of-breed sites and to understand if any learnings could be made.
The client had a strong set of market research data were already targeting their off-line proposition at a set of pre-defined customer segments.
I created a set of personas based on this segmentation and these formed the basis of the planning for the new site. User journeys based on these personas were also created to identify key paths throughout the site, both for information seeking and for the booking process.
A detailed site map was then produced to help the client understand the proposed site structure, and the user journeys were used to validate the structure at this stage.
From there a set of low-fidelity wireframes were produced to help the creative team begin the design process. These low-fi sketches where then turned into a functional prototype, allowing both the client and the creative team to further understand how the site would hang together.
There were a number of iterations during which the site map, prototype and creative designs were tweaked to reflect changing requirements, changing attitudes within the client’s organisation, and a changing marketplace.
The site also underwent a round of user testing in order to ensure the integrity of key message on the homepage, core navigation and the booking process. The testing identified areas for improvement which where then fed back into the site during a later iteration.
Below is an example of one of the proposed new homepage designs:
