CruiseCritic Aggregator App

Complexity, Gone Away

cruisecritic.com

Cruise customers can be highly specific. Or not. We built a site to serve them both.

  • Taxonomy

    Using a mix of open and closed card sorting, tree testing, and first-click studies, we build an information architecture people can navigate with confidence.

  • Personas

    We bring your target users to life with personas rooted in research and built on real data, so every downstream decision has a clear, consistent voice to model against.

  • Journey Maps

    The path of an experience is seldom a straight one. We map it stage by stage, capturing what users do, think, and feel along the way, to surface pain points and opportunities hiding in plain sight.

  • Competitive Analysis

    We study your competitors and the best practices beyond your category to establish the baseline users expect, and to find the openings that let you differentiate.

  • Sketches

    When it comes to bringing ideas to life, the pencil is mightier than the keyboard. And much faster.

  • Prototyping

    If a picture is a thousand words, a high-fidelity prototype is the entire story. Testing with one gets us past hypothetical reactions and into real behavior, the kind of feedback we can actually trust. With AI-assisted prototypes, we go even deeper, real data, real interactions, insight we couldn’t get any other way.

  • Responsive Design

    We design every feature and flow for every screen it could appear on. The real test isn’t the device, it’s whether every decision still makes sense no matter how someone’s viewing it.

  • Style Tiles

    Establish your visual direction with style tiles — a collection of elements meshed together to create art-direction, typography and visual hierarchy.

  • Visual Design

    Through imagery, messaging, color and typography, we deliberate over pixels, consistency, readability, contrast, accessibility and creativity.

  • Usability Testing

    We ride-along as users navigate digital experiences while trying to achieve their goals. Sometimes we ask probing questions. Sometimes we just observe. Unearthing friction early costs a conversation. Catching it later could cost the business.

  • Design Handoff

    Final screens, specifications, documentation, and content assets—organized in Figma and AI-ready Markdown so both your developers and their coding tools can move seamlessly from design to build.

The Challenge

Choosing a cruise is no walk on the Promenade Deck. Not only is it a serious financial investment, but it’s also a psychological one. After all, you’re often spending a week or more of your life on a boat where you’re captive between port visits, living in a floating ecosystem of people you’ve never met.


Designing for this kind of shopping experience is equally daunting. The knowledge base of users on cruise sites can vary from the veterans of 100+ voyages to virgin cruisers who have never stepped foot on a boat. And they all typically enter the equation from different starting points, deep-linked from search engines that tap into their specific interests.

An immersive and inspiring digital experience that considers every page as a starting point
An immersive and inspiring digital experience that considers every page as a starting point

Cruise Critic needed to find a way to accommodate all these disparate information needs, across multiple visits, that created a complex matrix of use cases. As an aggregator site, they also had to provide value-add content and community to keep people engaged—while ultimately sending users out to a partner site to complete the transaction.

Taxonomy research with users helped guide the site structure
Taxonomy research with users helped guide the site structure

Our Approach

Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.


This project demanded continued exploration and refinement to put all the pieces together in the right balance. Some well-founded concepts were found to be a dead end for users. Others seemed to strike the right balance but quickly proved problematic. Because there was so much content to contend with, and such variance between users, it was crucial to have lots of ideas and be able to pivot quickly to get to something that worked.

A multi-faceted decision process was elegantly presented through a mix of nested filters and info graphics
A multi-faceted decision process was elegantly presented through a mix of nested filters and info graphics

The Results

Ultimately (and pretty quickly) we landed on an experience that accommodates a multitude of entry points, scenarios and personas—moving users seamlessly through the conversion funnel. The work speaks for itself. Check out the site at CruiseCritic.com. Better yet, start with Google like our users do (it does well there, too).

Revenue Per Visit

Up

Conversion Rate

Up

Net Promoter Scores

Up

We entrusted ZeroDegrees on one of the most important and visible initiatives for the business—the redesign of our flagship site.

They expertly guided a project full of high impact decisions, exceeding expectations along the way. The final product is a powerful change for our customer and our company.

Mike Ewing, Vice president, cruise & GM Cruise critic at tripadvisor