An Elevated Experience Powered By Creative Iteration

Guests already loved American Cruise Line's adventures. All they needed now was a digital experience to match. The problem: getting it live in time for their busiest season.

Brand & Audience Insights:

The first stop on our journey was to conduct stakeholder conversations and "hallroom testing" with simulated audiences. These sessions revealed ACL's core audience is affluent older adults looking to explore and book online without hassle. With these findings, our team was able to set a course, prioritizing which updates were most critical and time-sensitive. With ACL's older audience in mind, we focused on simplicity in navigation, clarity in communication, and accessibility in layout and design.

Solving the Problem: 

While ACL’s business had been chugging along, the website hadn’t kept pace, and it needed some significant updates. We prioritized redesigning the most time-critical pieces of the website so it was ready for their peak shopping season. From there, we focused on more nuanced User Experience updates throughout the website to keep potential cruisers happy. And lastly, we consolidated and documented styles into a comprehensive Design System.

To kick things off, our UX team members conducted independent heuristic analyses and dug into heat maps and session recordings. From there, we pulled together recommendations rooted in best practices and real user behavior.

Findings were ranked by engineering effort and potential impact, structured around user flow and its role in the buyer journey. In total, we compiled over 65 recommended updates to enhance the core website experience. We emphasized the quick wins - low-effort, high-impact changes that could drive results quickly, given the tight timeline. We also included more complex ideas and lower-confidence opportunities, along with guidance on how to roll them out or test them through A/B experiments. That way, nothing valuable was left on the table. All of these updates were implemented ahead of peak season, ensuring the site was in its best possible shape when it mattered most.

Over the next few months, we worked closely with the ACL marketing team to prioritize the remaining items from our original audit and incorporated new feedback as the ACL business grew and the operational model changed. The website received additional improvements to secondary pages, which helped define clear and intuitive pathfinding. 

After months of iteration, the website looked great, but inconsistencies remained in the architecture. A final consolidation and polish pass helped bring everything into alignment. 

To support their long-term success, we developed a durable Design System. This provided the ACL team with definitive guidelines and genuine autonomy over their site experience, proving particularly valuable during their CMS upgrade.

Results: 

A human-centered audit clearly defined the highest-impact opportunities for both the business and users. Iterative sprints brought it to life quickly, and a Design System crystallized the new direction for future CMS platform upgrades.
The new, easier experience saw users spending more time finding the right cruise for them online, with fewer instances of customers having to call in to the service center in order to book a cruise.