The Cistercian Route
2024 · 4 min read
Tourism, redesigned
The Cistercian Route has heritage, landscape, and personality. What it lacked was an interface to match its stature. This redesign is based on analyzing its friction points to rethink its digital experience: more accessible, more intuitive, and visually coherent. Can design live up to centuries of history?
Redesign of interface
Accessibility
Mobile first
Analysis process
I started by analyzing the original interface to break down its main problems: confusing hierarchies in the menu and the footer, a landing page with few elements, a section to search for accommodation with hardly any search filters, and a contact form that did not provide effective feedback to the user, denying them the opportunity to know if they had made any mistakes or if their inquiry had been sent. All of this harmed their navigation, forcing them to leave the website.
With this, I created a benchmarking to analyze other tourism brands and find applicable criteria for this redesign: they all had in common a shallow information architecture, a very coherent look and feel, and large format photographs. I reorganized the content into a sitemap to prioritize effective information searching.
Graphic identity
The Cistercian Route has a rich historical and cultural heritage. I sought to reference this graphically, evoking the tranquility, tradition, and nature that characterizes it in a close and friendly manner. To define its tone, I used a moodboard that defined the color palette, typography, and types of photographs. Thus, natural textures will appear, an earthy yellow that evokes the stones of the monasteries, a burgundy that refers to the local red wine, a serif font that conveys tradition, and high-contrast photographs that highlight the architectural shapes and landscape.
Redesign of the interface
This redesign was done with a mobile first approach, which ensures an optimal experience on smartphones. In addition, it is scalable, allowing screens to adapt to larger devices. I designed the mobile screens first and then the desktop ones, but both reflected the same improvements: the menu and footer have been reconfigured, the landing now has a preview of the most important sections, the accommodation search now allows filtering by more criteria, and the contact form provides feedback through changes in its appearance.
Landing page
Accommodation search page
Contact form
Style guide
To maintain graphic consistency in future updates, I have created a style guide. It details which visual elements are used, how they should be used, and their appearance in different states.
In it, I especially took care of accessibility by using very contrasting colors so that even people with low vision can access the content. Specifically, achieving the AA level of contrast.
Conclusions
The redesign demonstrates that certain structural changes, such as reorganizing the menu, adding search filters, and providing feedback in the forms, have a direct impact on the user experience.
The next natural step would be to validate the improvements with real users through usability tests, to iterate before a hypothetical implementation.