Back To Case Studies

Hunter Valley Ballooning

UX / UI DESIGN + WEB DEVELOPMENT

The Brief.

Hunter Valley Ballooning has been offering superior hot air balloon flights daily over the scenic Hunter Valley region for over 30 years. With beautiful balloons, highly skilled pilots and dedicated staff, Hunter Valley Ballooning is the best choice when, as their slogan goes, ‘it's the experience that matters’.

We took that same mantra with our approach to Hunter Valley Ballooning’s request for Zimple to design and develop their new website. The new website needed to better reflect their brand and do a better job of featuring their flight options and gift vouchers. It was important that the new website included a competitive performance edge to drive online bookings across devices with an easy-to-update CMS. In addition to that, an area of the site had to highlight their involvement with the ‘Adventure Ballooning Network’.

Ultimately, Hunter Valley Ballooning wanted a modern website that is easy to navigate and offers a direct and easy way to book flights.

Objective(s)

To use the existing sitemap with necessary user flow modifications to improve the user experience and give users the ability to book any flight/voucher from one page. This would then create a clear path to increased online bookings and reduced phone bookings. Using existing or similar content as the existing site, we were to add the ability to book via external links, making flight options and gift vouchers more prominent.

Service Areas

UX Workshop
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Website Design & Development
Back-end Development
Project Management

Process

We held a kickoff meeting to filter down the user profiles and their journeys on site. Previously, users were having to search by location and then select their ticket, however we found that most users were searching by ticket type first, then looking at the locations.

By establishing the target market and the experiences HVB provided, we concluded that the existing branding did not align with where Hunter Valley Ballooning should be so we undertook a branding refresh were we created a new logo, selected new fonts and brand colours to bring the branding in line with the tone of voice.

Solution

To meet the objectives, we identified key goals for each page and ensured the layout drove users to these areas on the site. The new design made it easier for users to decide which flight option was best for them. We designed the main flights page to allow for an easy comparison.

Once a user moves to an individual ticket page there is a tab below which allows the user to jump between the ticket options so that they don’t have to go back to the main ticket page. The visual design direction was set with the existing branding however the balance was a little off with the overuse of the green, which we found to class with the pink tones, so skew the colour weighting to be more towards the pink.

The use of the animated balloon graphic from the logo helps to ensure the look and feel of the new website is modern and of a high quality. The imagery selected also helps push the experience you can expect from a flight with the Hunter Valley Ballooning team. To modernise the website we elevated the existing branding along with producing effective user experience that aligns with the goals Hunter Valley Ballooning have for their new website.

Evaluation

Overall Hunter Valley Ballooning are ecstatic with their new website; we were able to create a streamlined user experience which allowed for bookings to be at the forefront of the journey. Utilising high quality imagery on site and featuring these we were able to give the users a sense of what they might experience in the air. After a reading pleasing experience Hunter Valley Ballooning team reached out 12 months post go live for us to complete another site build for one of their other brands.