Costa Rica, Longo Mai Website Redesign
Strategy
Starting the website redesign process with strategy is a step that is often overlooked. Having a strong understanding of what your goals are, who the audience is, and how to best demonstrate your brand, are all important aspects that need to be identified.
If you are considering a website redesign, then you most likely have a reason for doing so. Do you need to adhere to a major change in your business plan? Is your site outdated and feels inconsistent with your brand? Whatever the reason, determining your key goals for the website early on is essential and will impact your overall design strategy.
So going into this project the strategy was to bring the modern style of tourist website which includes videos and rich images. Adding videos and images reduce the bounce rate on a website and improves engagement. The team had to consider who our target audience and demographic is. The information the team gathered about our target audience really helped and guided us on the site’s design, usability, and structure.
The User Experience
Now, what does a good User experience look like? Well, good UX design encompasses the core desires and/or problems of your user. The team considered how users will interact with the website and how it can support their needs or wants.
Driving people to the website through a strong content marketing strategy was another key component in the redesign process. Creating and producing content that was also very relevant and beneficial to the target audience. This will significantly aid in driving traffic to the website. One of the biggest challenges the team had was content management which was selecting the right content since we had a lot of video and images to put out there. Most importantly, the content needed to address the needs and wants of our user persona.
Design
The visual components of the website were supported by strategy and geared towards a strong user-focused approach, that irrevocably enhances the entire user experience. While it’s important to design the website to be visually appealing and beautiful, it’s imperative to have a website that is easy to navigate through. Ideally, a website that encompasses both a beautiful design and a well-constructed layout allows a user to find exactly what they are looking for.
Overall, the design of the website conveyed our message and values as clearly as possible.
General UX Improvements:
1) White space – This website is going to be content-heavy so there needs to be room for the user’s eyes and content to breathe.
2) Intuitive user interface
3) Content hierarchy – Sections are bolded in white on this site but aren’t good enough to visually section it. Utilize font formatting features.
4) Teaser blocks – that provide titles and a short amount of information and give links to “Read more” into pages with longer amounts of information.
5) Link text to references – adding superscript numbers to access bibliography/references to studies can be
Useful instead of adding all of the information on the same page.
User Persona
Longo Mai is known for hosting mainly three types of tourist which include Short-term, Long-term, and Academic tourism for educational purposes. The team designed three different personas to help guide the team in the redesign processes.
Wireframes
