Celebrity Cruises turned to Building Blocks to help them optimise the user experience for an increasing volume of mobile customers. Building Blocks discuss the work
Celebrity Cruises’ fleet of 11 award-winning ships, with their high quality, contemporary designs and exceptional levels of service, have set the worldwide standard for modern, luxurious cruise travel.
In 2014, Celebrity undertook a digital project to improve the mobile journey for their website, as well as to increase conversion and deliver a positive brand experience, in line with their modern luxury values.
Specifically, Celebrity wanted to:
Deliver a fully responsive website and provide an optimised experience for the increasing volume of mobile traffic. (Pre-project, over 50 per cent of website visits were on mobile).
Rationalise content and navigation to simplify the journey for users in the research phase.
Re-build the itinerary search, allowing guests to search by specific destination rather than company-determined locations.
Bolster conversion with strong and consistent signposting and calls-to-action, as well as a simplified route to booking.
Develop a visual identity to reflect the company’s modern luxury brand values across the digital landscape.
Accommodate future features, such as personalisation, within the build.
Celebrity’s target demographic are wealthy travellers, both those experienced in cruising and those considering it for the first time, with a broad age demographic of 35 years upwards.
Over 50 per cent of visits to the website were from mobile devices, and Celebrity wanted to ensure it was meeting customer needs with an optimised user journey.
To devise the strategy, Building Blocks undertook stakeholder workshops to fully understand Celebrity’s business objectives. We created a digital vision and a road map which was segmented into three unique phases: responsive infrastructure for improved conversion; personalisation; and closed-loop customer journeys.
The focus for this project was the first phase, with all efforts geared towards creating a responsive solution that would increase conversion rates. This phase included: responsive interface build; enhanced search; flexibility to focus on itinerary-specific campaigns and tactical offers; and single level content taxonomy.
To define the content structure, we undertook a full content audit to uncover the silos and discover duplicated content. Celebrity had a lot of rich content, but some of the most valuable information was buried deep within a complex navigation structure. Using analytics and personas, we assessed customer visits to understand which information was most accessed and desired, to steer the content prioritisation for the new site.
Atomised Content
In order to give the digital team the flexibility to display campaign content in a way they wanted, and thinking ahead to the future personalisation of the website, we proposed an atomised content approach. Content cards provide not only a flexible content management solution but are also easily readable on both desktop and mobile devices.
These content cards can be distributed throughout the website to surface offers and deals, page summaries and editorial features. The content cards drive traffic to the itinerary page, helping to guide people towards conversion.
Itinerary Search Tool
The itinerary search tool was completely re-engineered for Celebrity to solve a long-term struggle that customers had when trying to search for cruises by a specific country, port or location.
Integral to the design of the itinerary search was the reduction of the number of clicks/swipes/pinches needed to search itineraries on any device.
Throughout the design phase, we developed mobile and desktop prototypes, and tested them on users who regularly go on cruises or are considering a cruise in the next year. Their feedback was taken into consideration and steered the development of the designs to ensure a truly customer-centric delivery.
Functionality with a Slick Finish
We experimented with using an interactive design that could be used confidently on different devices, before defining imagery styles. We created a visual hierarchy of colours, images and offer CTAs for the key hub pages—all geared towards attracting and engaging Celebrity’s target demographic.
A rich brand story was overlaid across the content to create a slick, responsive, and visually stunning website. The site is geared towards creating an excellent mobile customer experience, promoting conversion by exciting users with itinerary content and powerful imagery, and simplifying the booking journey.
Online Revenue Up 226 Per Cent
The overarching objective of this project was to create a mobile-responsive site that simplified the booking journey and increased conversion.
The website is still in beta phase—live in Ireland with the UK to follow in March—but already results are extremely positive.
Online revenue has increased 226 per cent.
Unique visits to the website have increased 650 per cent.
Organic traffic is up 256 per cent.
Bounce rates on mobile and tablet devices have decreased by 35 per cent and 27 per cent, respectively.
Customer feedback from guests who have booked a cruise on the new site:
How satisfied were you overall with your shopping experience?
“For something as complicated as a cruise I felt it was easy”
How satisfied were you with the look & feel of our website?
“I’ve visited the site on a tablet previously and felt that it was much improved this time – it’s much easier to use on a tablet now.”
Customer feedback from user groups
“Absolutely brilliant page—one of the best cruise ship pages I have seen.”
– Itinerary search page
“Now that’s what I’m talking about…totally engaging.”
– Itinerary search page
”Oh, wow. The images look fantastic…I love that the text is large and easy to read.”
– Itinerary search page
“The task is extremely easy to complete.”
– ‘Find your perfect cruise’ page