Celebrity Cruises are an American premium cruise company. They have a fleet of 11 ships and sail the world over. They stand for quality and their brand proposition is 'Modern Luxury'. They needed a website that communicated effectively on any device.
Nominated for Website of the year 2015
Prolific North Awards
Exploring what it could be
At Building Blocks we worked agile and started the project with an explore phase. This meant exploring everything about the industry, the competitors, the current website, reference of modern website design techniques we liked and then outlining our vision for the site. All of this output went onto a wall and from that we could then start to wireframe it out and test some journeys.
The explore output. Sketches, post it notes, wireframes, reference and vision.
Now we know, lets wireframe it
(and test some more!)
After the explore phase outputs where agreed with the client and testing results came back positive the site could then be wireframed in confidence to a more detailed level of structure and content. It was all produced in Axure so that the site could be navigated around and tested further with simple tasks at different breakpoints.
Detailed wireframes from Axure replace the Explore output ready for more work to be done with visual design.
Visual design and prototype
Finally after I had sketch out the wireframes with our UX guy it was over to visual design. This phase covered visuals at multiple breakpoints, after effects animations to show movement and visuals and the content of each page. We used Marvel and Invision to prototype how it would feel.
Designed mobile first with use of content cards / Navigation uses whole screen at all breakpoints
Let's make sure it's good
As we went through the design process we built more detailed HTML, Axure and Marvel prototypes. This enabled us to validate our thinking, test important journeys and see how the visual design feels on multiple devices, especially important was how the different card designs and full screen navigation felt on mobile.
The whole site from every aspect has been designed for a lay back easy read experience. Minimal amount of taps, lots of scroll with onward journeys through relevant cards.
Keeping the content simple
When the framework of the website was in place and the look and feel was set it was over to the content managers to populate with the content, I would then take a consultancy role, advising on key pages. This consisted of the right mood for images and what to say in the most simple way possible.
The content was structured so that every page had aspirational content balanced with more functional content, this way if someone wasn't hooked by the page then we had an onward journey on offer to go and find the pages that they would be more interested in.
The cruise finder functionality on tablet landscape.