Redesigning B&R’s Digital Experience (In Progress)

Background

Company: Butterfield & Robinson (B&R), a luxury travel company.

Goal: Lead the digital transformation by redesigning the website to reflect B&R’s luxury and personalized travel experience.

Role: UX Designer, leading the user research and defining the UX foundations.

Persona Development

Objective: To create validated user personas that would guide design decisions and enhance user experience.

Process:

    • Conducted stakeholder interviews with Sales and CX teams to understand traveler behavior, needs, and pain points.

    • Collaborated with the Customer Experience Director to define recurring traveler archetypes.

    • Ran an internal survey to validate assumptions and refine persona characteristics.

    • Synthesized data into persona drafts based on behavioral patterns and motivations, excluding demographic data.

    • Iterated the personas with cross-functional feedback, ensuring they aligned with both business goals and observed user behaviors.

Persona Mockup

 

Persona Evaluation Survey

 

Outcome: Finalized personas helped the team align on user needs, guiding design, content decisions, and feature prioritization across teams.

User Flows & Journey Mapping

Objective: Map out clear user flows and journeys to streamline the digital experience.

Process:

    • Conducted a flow analysis of the existing website’s key tasks (e.g., trip discovery, booking, itinerary exploration) and identified performance gaps.

    • Created persona-based user flows to ensure the design met users’ digital habits and behaviors.

       

      Speculated User Flow

       

    • Developed user journey maps that detailed each step of the user experience, identifying touchpoints, pain points, and emotional highs/lows.

       

      Speculated User Journey

       

    • Conducted usability testing with UserTesting.com, targeting personas’ needs to validate flows.

Outcome: Validated and optimized user flows and journey maps, improving task completion efficiency, reducing friction, and informing design direction.

Establishing Clear Objectives

Objective: Align the team on project goals, pain points, and priorities.

Process:

    • Stakeholder collaboration: Conducted workshops with Marketing, Sales, and Digital Experience teams to define user and business goals.

    • Pain point identification: Analyzed user feedback to pinpoint major issues in the current digital experience.

Outcome: Defined a well-aligned project scope, ensuring that design efforts directly addressed real user challenges while meeting business objectives.

Competitive Benchmarking

Objective: Analyze competitors’ digital experiences to identify opportunities and industry best practices.

Process:

    • Reviewed competitors to assess design strengths, weaknesses, and UX trends.

    • Analyzed design elements, user flows, content strategy, and navigation to identify areas of improvement and differentiation.

    • Industry trends: Kept track of the latest advancements in the travel and digital experience space to stay competitive.

       

      Competitive Research

Outcome: Gained actionable insights from competitors that guided feature prioritization, design decisions, and helped define areas to differentiate B&R from the competition.

Design Architecture & Sitemap

Objective: Develop the website’s architecture and sitemap to ensure an intuitive, scalable, and user-centered navigation structure.

Process:

    • Analyzed the business and user needs to develop a clear site hierarchy that was easy to navigate.

    • Created a detailed sitemap that represented the key areas of the website, ensuring users could easily access important information like trip discovery, booking, and customer support.

    • Focused on creating a flat architecture with minimal clicks to core content, while still allowing for deep exploration of trip options.

Sitemap Highlights

 

Outcome: A user-centric sitemap that allowed easy access to all services and content with a clear and logical flow, enhancing overall usability.

Turning Insights Into Solutions

Objective: Create design solutions that solve user pain points and align with business goals.

Process:

    • Conducted brainstorming and ideation sessions with Marketing, Sales, and Digital Experience teams.

    • Created wireframes and mockups for key user flows and website elements to visualize potential layouts and interactions.

      Wireframe Highlights

    • Built high-fidelity prototypes incorporating a strong content strategy to guide user understanding and intent.

    • Designed thoughtful micro-interactions to improve usability and create an engaging experience.

    • Ensured accessibility by using Figma plugins to test contrast ratios and font sizes, ensuring compliance with WCAG 2.1 standards.

      Accessibiblity Test Insight

    • Developed an extensive design system, starting with the Marketing style guide, ensuring consistency across the platform.

Design System Highlights

 

Outcome: Produced a solid framework for the website’s structure, with a clear design system to guide visual and interaction consistency.

Validating Design Assumptions

Objective: Ensure that the design decisions were on target and met user needs before finalizing.

Process:

    • Usability testing with Maze testing software, targeting specific user flows, navigation paths, and usability challenges.

      Maze Test Insisghts

    • Organized stakeholder reviews to collect feedback on design direction, ensuring alignment with business goals.

Outcome: Identified usability issues and received valuable feedback, leading to refinement in design elements, user flows, and content strategy before moving into development.

Refining and Finalizing Design

Objective: Finalize the design, making necessary adjustments based on testing feedback, and prepare for development.

Process:

    • Incorporated feedback from usability testing and stakeholder reviews into the design, refining user flows and visual elements for a smoother experience.

    • Focused on a desktop-first design approach due to the primary desktop user base, then created responsive designs for mobile optimization.

    • Handoff to development: Finalized the design and provided assets and specifications to the development team for implementation.

    • Utilized PostHog to track user interactions and gather insights, optimizing user flows and identifying key areas for improvement based on real-time analytics.

Outcome: Delivered a polished, responsive design ready for development, meeting both user needs and business goals.

Conclusion

This UX redesign process led to a streamlined, user-friendly website that reflects Butterfield & Robinson’s luxury service and unique value proposition. By grounding design decisions in user research, competitor insights, and iterative testing, we were able to create a digital experience that supports both B&R’s business goals and enhances the user’s journey from discovery to booking.