Island Cruises – New designs treble online revenues

What Island Cruises say:‘Explanations and reasons for going in certain directions were always rational and backed up by customer insight.’— Tom Brett, Island Cruises.

Overview

An example extract from an expert usability review cxpartners produced for Island Cruises

Cruises are a high-value product with a complicated, lengthy sales process. The variety of options and the cost of the product means that many people drop-out of online buying processes and seek the help of an intermediary. For operators, this means increased costs and lost sales.

Island Cruises wanted to increase the sales on their site by improving their conversion of visitors to buyers.

TIP: Expert Usability Reviews Find out about how cxpartners run expert usability reviews

Yet making changes to such a complex process will always concern stakeholders who want to be sure that their interests are not being overlooked.

What we did

We began by understanding the complex process of buying a cruise. We wanted to find out what motivated Island Cruises’ customers, how they planned their holidays and where the website fitted into that process.

We interviewed cruise bookers to understand what they had done, where the pain point were, what they enjoyed, and we watched them as they used the Island Cruises website.

Cabin selection pages are a problem for many cruise companies

We investigated how customers booked extras (such as excursions from the ship). We discovered that where these were placed in the booking process had a profound affect on whether or not customers added them to their cruise itinerary.

This gave us a baseline from which we created a model of how the site should work and a set of wireframe mock-ups of how the site should work.

TIP: Wireframes Find out about how cxpartners produce wireframes

We tested this with users and refined the model, improving the use of photographs, simplifying navigation and making it easier for customers to understand what they were booking.

We then launched the final designs and held our breath.

Results

An example wireframe cxpartners produced for Island Cruises

The transparent process we used also meant that, in the words of Island Cruises ‘explanations and reasons for going in certain directions were always rational, backed up with customer insight’. This meant getting stakeholder buy-in was straightforward.

Following the launch, Island Cruises’ bookings rose sharply and throughout the following year, Island Cruises saw their bookings treble overall – a huge boost in performance.

The Island Cruises homepage following cxpartners user research and re-design