Increase Grupo Hotusa’s visibility and branding by giving it a modern and clean website
Grupo Hotusa is a dynamic and expanding organization with more than 40 years of experience, made up of a group of companies from various areas of the tourism sector.
In fall 2021, I was given the opportunity to start designing a new website for the Grupo Hotusa brand with the main focus being to give the brand a website that is up to date with the current design trends but also explain and showcase what they do, their history and their innovation in the travel business.
Timeline
Nov 2021 — Jan 2022
Platform
Responsive website
My role
Web designer, Art director
Team
Marketing Director, Developers
Tools
Adobe XD (please don’t judge, this was a long time ago)
What I did
I worked with the marketing team, building a wireframe that held all of their needs and ultimately designing a website to give the brand a modern feel.
The Problem 🚧
Due to its old look, the website was never given any importance inside the company nor in their external communications. And because of its low usage, it was never prioritized to make any improvements in it.
The website looked outdated
It had been a while since they redesigned their website, resulting in an outdated look that the company no longer felt identified with.
It was lacking some important information or it was not highlighted properly
Some important information did not have an important role in their website. Like their events calendar, where the marketing team puts so much effort on, was nowhere to be seen. Grupo Hotusa is an awarded, leading company with a long track record of 40 years. The team felt that the website they had did not show how accomplished the company is in its field.
#Goals 🎯
Define their branding
Create a branding system with typography and colors to be used in the website.
Highlight Grupo Hotusa’s accomplishments
Being a dynamic organization, Grupo Hotusa is always up to something. The team needed the website to be a platform to be able to share all of the content they are constantly producing.
Communicate their values
To give clearer messaging. Throughout the years, the organization has had major important changes that had to be communicated in the new website design.
Drive traffic to the website
To have a website that they feel identified with and comfortable sharing to build up their web presence.
Impact 📈
The website was launched in January 2022, just in time to be shared in Hotusa Explora (one of Grupo Hotusa’s major events) and Fitur (the biggest tourism fair in Spain). At that time and because of those events, we were anticipating a big push in public attention to Grupo Hotusa. Hence we speed up building and launching this site, which initially had a loose deadline.
As of 5 months from the launching date, we saw a 69% increase in visits and 77% new users compared to the previous website design.
Early Ideation 🤔
Starting from a PowerPoint presentation made by the marketing team with all of the important information they wanted the website to adress and a wireframe of the homepage, we kicked off a design sprint together.
I gathered inspiration about how other forward-thinking brands in the tourism business craft their website, and shared what we liked about them. We also studied Grupo Hotusa’s direct competitors to find a proper way to differentiate ourselves.
Color mood
Trying out the layout, I liked it better when we focused on white backgrounds and then adding structure with some gray shading in some sections.
A great first impression
As the marketing wanted to start the navigation in the website with a video, I started to study the idea of a loop video with a series of images that could resume what the company is about.
This idea did not really move forward because at the time it was important for the team to show their founder and spokesperson Amancio López on the homepage. They were also preparing a series of 3 minutes videos where Mr. López talked about several topics inside the travel business and thought it was great content to open the website.
Then I used a looping snip of the video as a fullscreen background, but the team didn’t feel comfortable because of the video quality.
Nonetheless, I continued to work on the video idea, maybe making it smaller to remove some protagonism from it, then worked on this modular type of design that started to feel right for me but needed to be further developed.
I came up with this half-and-half distribution that made me feel comfortable. The team decided the left part was perfect to highlight the company values.
Meet the deadlines
In the middle of the design phase of the project, our deadline was reduced to be around two months away (not only for design, but also for development), and the whole team was expected to release the website in time for one of Grupo Hotusa’s biggest events.
As the homepage and the design elements were defined, I started to build the rest of the pages based on the first one and tried to “recycle” as many elements as possible.
Final Designs ✅
Before and after
Before the redesign, there was a lack of focus on what Grupo Hotusa means and stands for, a lack of branding and the website looked outdated. The design language was inconsistent with Grupo Hotusa.
Highlight Grupo Hotusa’s Chairman
It was important for the team to show their chairman and spokesperson as a main image in the homepage. We chose a sleek picture and made it work with the rest of the website.
Code “economy”
When the project commenced, the deadline was unexpectedly shortened. At that juncture, the development team requested the website to incorporate several ‘modules’ that could be replicated across the site. I selected interchangeable modules that could seamlessly collaborate, ensuring a consistent and polished appearance.
Future steps 🚀
Here are our future plans for the website:
Maintain and update the website
We will ensure information such as events and brands are up to date.
Add an interactive map
Due to the lack of time, the development department asked for this idea to be paused at the moment, but in the future we hope to create an interactive map to view all of Grupo Hotusa’s hotels in the world 🗺.
Fix some navigation issues
Make sure the website is easy to comprehend, as Grupo Hotusa is a big corporation where a lot of things are happening at the same time.
Even though I am very proud to have worked in this project and also very happy with the final aesthetic side of it, I have been learning more and more about UX/UI lately and I know there are some sides of it that could use an improve. That is why I want to do a post soon about what improvements would I do to this site’s design.
Stay tuned for that! 😉
