Redesign: FTI Magazine

Attracting new customers through enhanced user experience and content-focused design

Role

Product Designer

Industry

Tourism

Background

FTI Touristik, an online travel agency, specializes in providing curated package tours to destinations worldwide. Although their existing travel blog offered valuable content, it was not effectively engaging users or driving significant traffic and conversions. FTI Touristik sought to redesign the blog to maximize its potential as a powerful marketing tool.

Objective

Redesign the travel blog to enhance user engagement, increase traffic, and drive conversions for FTI Touristik's package tours.

Goals

Improve User Engagement: Create a more visually appealing and user-friendly blog to increase reader interaction.
Boost Traffic: Implement SEO best practices and shareable content to attract more visitors.
Enhance Brand Authority: Strengthen FTI Touristik's position as a trusted travel expert through high-quality content and design.

Background

Objective

Redesign the travel blog to enhance user engagement, increase traffic, and drive conversions for FTI Touristik's package tours.

Goals

Improve User Engagement: Create a more visually appealing and user-friendly blog to increase reader interaction.
Boost Traffic: Implement SEO best practices and shareable content to attract more visitors.
Enhance Brand Authority: Strengthen FTI Touristik's position as a trusted travel expert through high-quality content and design.

User Research & Insights

The FTI Research team conducted a study to understand how our customers explore holiday options as part of a broader research initiative.

These are some of the collected insights:

Market Research

I reviewed top-performing travel & corporate blogs to identify industry best practices and analyzed and compared (unique) features to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Content Structure & Design

After gathering user insights and taking a closer look at the market, I listed some of the key features and changes that needed to be done:

Homepage:

Intuitive and simplified navigation with categories like "Destinations," "Travel Tips," and "Travel Stories"
A visually appealing header with rotating images showcasing top articles
Featured articles section with engaging thumbnails and headlines
Featured editor section with personal quotes & photos
Travel news & events calendar
Best travel time section

Blog Post Template:

Large, captivating headers with high-resolution images
Clean, readable fonts and a structured layout for easy reading
Easy sharing & social media posting options
Embedded videos, interactive maps, and photo galleries to enhance engagement
Comment section
Sidebar with related posts, popular destinations

Conversion Elements:

Strategically placed CTAs throughout the blog content
"Book Now" buttons linking directly to relevant package tour pages
Pop-up forms for newsletter sign-ups offering exclusive travel tips and deals

Content Strategy

We planned

on offering a mix of destination guides, travel tips, personal travel stories, and exclusive content about FTI Touristik's tours
to collaborate with travel influencers and guest bloggers to expand reach and credibility
to offer a community platform from users to users for authentic and reviewed travel experiences
for seasonal and trend-based content to capitalize on peak travel times and popular travel trends

blog concept for an event calendar and podcast integration

Desktop and mobile view of the blogs homepage

Outcomes

Though the blog redesign project was terminated due to circumstances beyond our control (insolvency), the experience was invaluable and demonstrated our vision and dedication. To ensure brand recognition I used the newly created Sunscreen's Design System Components. I kept the design minimalistic (color) and less uniform (pictures) to give the content enough space to shine. The navigation was simplified and navigation items were more distinct from each other. New features for customer engagement, such as a comments section, and social media integration were included in the design.

With the new content strategy and improved design in place, I can only assume this project would have created the outcome we'd hoped for.