Amrumer Vermietungsservice is a small vacation rental business on the idyllic island of Amrum in the North Sea. Stephanie, who owns and manages the business, asked us to help her update the existing website and make it more user-friendly.
While the old website was clean and minimalistic, it was hard still to navigate through it due to its intricate structure. The biggest concern was that each property listing had its own page, which led to the user clicking through pages and pages of listings to find what they might like, and, eventually, getting lost. In addition, minimalistic design made it hard to capture and communicate to potential holiday-makers the spirit of beautiful Amrum to give them a glimpse into their future vacation.
Due to the project limitations, we focused on the main issue: creating a clear structure and to making it easier for the holiday-makers to find a perfect place to enjoy their Amrum holiday.
First, we did the audit of all the data that needed to be incorporated in the redesigned website and worked out the information architecture that made sense for the user. To avoid information overload, we have restructured the listings in such a way that the user could choose in how much detail they wanted to go about each listing without being constantly redirected to a new page.
At the same time, the clear call to action and contact information are always visible to the user looking for their ideal holiday rental, which helps create an uninterrupted experience.
In terms of the look and feel, we wanted to help Stephanie bring across the serene atmosphere of this beautiful island. Calming marine colour scheme and vintage illustrations, beautiful landscape photography (that we were lucky to find on Pexels and Unsplash), friendly and easy on the eye typography — all elements play off each other and entice the user to de-stress and build up anticipation of the peace and bliss of their Amrum getaway.
Stephanie received positive feedback from both the properties owners, whose beautiful properties it is now easier to browse, and the website users, who have all the necessary information only a couple of clicks away.
We are happy to have been a part of this project, which is another confident step for Amrumer Vermietungsservice towards exploring and using the benefits of digitalisation and the value it can bring to both the business and its clients. While we have achieved the main project goal, there is also an exciting lot of opportunities for further improvement of both the user experience (e.g. automating the booking process) and the backstage processes (developing an ecosystem with a CMS and a database to easily manage the listings, content and other data, integrated with a booking solution).
