Building an Inspiring Luxury Travel Website

Andrew Harper Travel (AHT) is a luxury travel agency that offers discerning members recommendations for luxury travel as well as the ability to bid on curated auctions and purchase discounted luxury vacation packages at select resorts. My role at AHT was to redesign and build out their new corporate site utilizing their existing branding as a base and to focus on acquiring new members.

Constraints:

V1 site needed to be live in a short amount of time.

The site needed to build/maintain trust among users since Andrew Harper Editorial and Andrew Harper Travel had essentially split into two separate companies that now shared a brand.

Concurrently needed to build the site UI and establish a design system.

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Site Navigation based on what Andrew Harper was using and based on what we needed to launch in phase one.

One of the first things I knew that we needed to figure out was to assess how the site was going to function in the larger context of our custom content management system and the backend portal. And then from that understanding determine the architecture of the site based on what Andrew Harper was using and what we could develop in a short amount of time for Phase 1. We very much needed to stay within the brand guidelines to maintain user trust in the brand. I decided to keep the nav layout very similar to Andrew Harper so that if the users were going to be going back and forth between the two sites then at least that level of navigation would feel familiar.

In order to do this I interviewed various stakeholders what were the important things that needed to be designed up front in order for the business to function since we would inherently need to build out this site in stages. I then worked with the marketing team to develop user journeys and user personas to determine all the of touch points of how users were able to become an Andrew Harper member via the experience.

Hybrid Journey map for a potential member utilizing the site.

There were several restrictions that came into play in terms of how the home page and following pages would have to be built out based on when the CTA would appear and working around the required placement of sponsored ads. The pages and UI also had to keep with the same brand and feel of what AHE would be doing on their side. I also wanted to be sure that becoming a member would be prominent on the homepage as we were primarily aiming for gaining new members with this particular go round.