Thrillist and Carnival Cruise Line®: Island Hoppers
B2C Product | UX and UI Design Lead
Group Nine’s Advertising Pod designed and developed a custom site for a co-branded comedy competition series hosted by James Van Der Beek. This series was filmed on the cruise line and produced by Brandshop, Group Nine’s in-house creative agency. I was the lead designer from Group Nine’s Product team. I led the design process from the initial pitch to the final site launch.
Our Approach
Engage Audience
“Choose Fun” was the theme for Carnival Cruise Line®’s 2019 campaign. To attract travelers, we wanted this site filled with vibrant visuals, breathy beach scenes and sunny vibes. On top of that, I added many interactive elements to keep our viewers entertained while glancing through this site.
For example, in the desktop view, when the viewer hovered on the episode card, the still image turned to a 5 second preview of funny moments in that episode. By seeing this preview, viewers were more likely to click and watch the full video. All episode cards got high click rates in our Google Analytics report.
Loading Screen
Watch Episode
On mobile devices, we extended the preview to full screen. It gave the best view of the content and kept the viewer focused. Viewers can swipe up and down to navigate through episodes. Eventually, viewers spent more time discovering and digesting our content.
Design <> Dev Handoff
I designed all breakpoints and shared the specs to the dev team through InVision. Since this concept had many overlapping transitions and animations, I decided to use Facebook’s Origami Studio to build an advanced prototype. The benefit of using Origami Studio is that its powerful patch editor supports building interaction, animation, and behavior based on conditions. When I handed the prototype over to our developer, he viewed the live transitions and got all conditions, time durations, types of animation curve, values, etc., everything needed for development all in one place. It helped him architect code with less redundancy. It significantly accelerated the team's development timeline.
Overall Experience
Numerator, June 2019
Best of the Week
Average Session Duration