Virtuoso Homepage
Revisioning the front page of Virtuoso.com
This was a 8-week design/development project working with Virtuoso's central UX design and front-end development team. You can view the website here.
- Prototyping, Visual Design
- Web Design, Web Development, Web Analytics
Process
How can we more effectively communicate the business and value proposition of Virtuoso?
(Connecting consumers to travel advisors)
To begin this project, we looked at the previous homepage and evaluated of its effectiveness based on our new business goals.
"What can we become better communicators to consumers?"
Our evaluation revealed several points:
- No clear calls-to-action in regards to find a travel advisor
- Not sufficient information about travel advisors or why a consumer would choose one on the surface level of the page
- Inconsistent visual design and hierarchy can confuse users of Virtuoso's brand and mission
- Less stock imagery
From the evaluation, the design team established key user and business goals:
Modernize the brand of Virtuoso
Communicate the differentiated value of the service
Inspire visitors of the site to connect with advisors
With these goals established, the design team began to ideate on potential home page designs.
The team went through several iterations of with varying layouts, visual treatments and typography choices. We narrowed down to a version that had clear sections of content, hierarchy in information and call to actions, and a cleaner color scheme.
After the team had settled on a design, I began to code it with some help of some front-end developers available to us. The development of the home page took about 2 weeks to fully code and iterate on further design ideas, which included web interactions and motion design.
Outcome
The new homepage received positive feedback from leadership and users alike as it not only represented the brand better, it also provided the necessary information needed to describe the differentiated value of Virtuoso. Numbers showed a great improvement as well. Bounce rate dropped from 46% -> 33%.
As a result of this project, I learned a great deal about web development and working with the content management system Kentico. I grew to understand how to optimize assets for loading and the importance of organizing the page to load assets in an effective manner.
Although the home page has been updated over the last two years, much of the same hierarchy and design principles have remained, showing how influential this project was in terms of the future for Virtuoso.
