OVERVIEW
At Lonely Planet we work with a wide range of clients who have vastly different KPIs but the one things that is consistent 9 times out of 10 is that they want a full blown website build…yesterday. So, rather than being reactive to these clients we decided to flip the switch and take a more proactive approach to these ‘custom’ microsite. We created a modular and scalable product that allows for quick custom builds by leveraging components from the CMS, greatly cutting down production time. Visually, these components are easy to skin in order to create a custom experience for each client while leveraging similar framework.
MY ROLE
Product Design
User testing
Research
Wireframing
Interaction
Visual design
CLIENTS
Previous design
CHALLENGES
Limited information ‘Above the Fold’
High bounce rate
Unclear hierarchy
No indication of site length
Inconsistent UX
Low engagement
New design
SOLUTION
We created a modular and scaleable microsite that would present the user with engaging visuals and content upfront in order to encourage further engagement. By creating ‘open state’ version of our content type the user is teased with enough content to draw them in and encourage them to read further but not enough that they don’t require further engagement. Also the content types were redesigned to have a different styling per each to set them apart - articles are the forefront, smaller digestive pieces live in the card/modal style and so on - creating visual cues for content type.
Impact
Evidence proves that the microsite redesign was successful for audience retention and engagement, contributing to lower bounce rates and more pages visited per session
USER RETENTION
Influenced by the microsite, traffic to related content increased on lonelyplanet.com 10.6% YOY
AUDIENCE
Over 8.5 million, and 173,453 total views of content, almost 7x higher than the previous campaign reach
BOUNCE RATE
Bounce rate dropped to less than 39% and pages per session (at 2.05) performed well above our site benchmarks, indicating users were extremely engaged with the site and content
