Arrow Digital was hired to re-build and re-design the marketing website for this rapidly expanding chain of resorts throughout Mexico and the Caribbean.

With 12 resorts over 3 brands, they needed a DNN template that could differentiate the unique features of each property, but promoted the brand’s offerings and amenities. Their premium amenity  is their high-grade food offerings, called Gourmet All-Inclusive. It was important to advertise brand-wide features, while retaining resort individuality.

Title: Senior UX Designer at Arrow Digital – West Palm Beach, FL
Project Role: Research, UX Design, Content Strategy
Stakeholders: Karisma Hotels Marketing team (customer)

Research

On our limited budget, I combined analytics and social media research to create personas for the different family combinations who would represent a wide range of customer needs.

 

 

Wireframes

I created all the wireframes for desktop and mobile in Axure. Each of the main pages got its own ‘template’ with more time spent on resort amenities and all inclusive deals. We worked with their third-party booking engine to integrate room rates at more points in the customer journey. If a user searched for prices at any time in the journey, their dates were saved, and corresponding prices were shown next to room types and resort pages.

 

Resort Wireframe

The resorts at Karisma varied in size from boutique to mega, with some offering adults-only pools, some with unique sports and others with renowned restaurants. We needed to design a template that showed each resort’s personality, and allowed them to showcase their selling points.

The statistics provide quick feedback to help a user see how large a resort is. The Highlights areas can be used to show off a celebrated restaurant or world class feature.

 

 

Final Designs

I worked with our Graphic Designer to design a style guide and skin for these designs. I managed content gathering, QA, and image procurement. A team had been sent down to Mexico to photograph all the rooms and we provided art direction for the hero images featuring models.

 

Result

Although the skin of Karisma Hotels has changed, the core UX flow remains in tact. We were eventually invited down to the Yucatan Peninsula to tour all 12 hotels and partake of the unlimited food and drink!