HABITAS Case Study

Digital Responsive Platform for Luxury
Hospitality Management Group
Infinity pool with white lounge chairs and umbrellas on a wooden deck, set against rocky desert cliffs under a clear sky.

Client Overview

HABITAS is a hospitality management group, home to a diverse global community of travelers, where people can experience music, wellness, and adventure at their resorts. It operates luxury hotels located across the globe.

Three mobile phone screens displaying the Habitas website: left screen shows 'Our Experience' with text about the Habitas experience and a sunset image of people paddle boarding on a calm lagoon labeled Bacalar; center screen shows the Habitas logo with a photo of a woman snorkeling underwater titled 'Underwater Worlds' by Evan Upchurch dated Jun 28, 2022, and text 'Our Journal'; right screen shows 'Our Homes' menu listing Alula, Caravan Alula, and Bacalar with contact information and address for Bacalar, Mexico.

Project Goal

The project goal was to redesign the website with an improved user experience, including navigation and footer, as well as improvements to the information architecture, multilingual support, and a custom media playback experience.
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With the redesign, Habitas wanted to provide an engaging experience on the website. They also wanted to showcase their culture and values across their global properties.

Services Provided

Detailed UX Audit with Recommendations
Responsive Web UI/UX Design
Front-End and Back-end Development
Website Performance Enhancements

Approach

Our team included multiple UX designers, front-end and back-end engineers, and a product manager. We coordinated our efforts following an agile process and worked closely with the client to define tasks.

We worked on solving the challenges from a user experience and engineering standpoint, bridging the gap between design and development to deliver a seamless experience for the users.

Tools

Wordpress Logo
Wordpress
Logo
Figma
Photoshop Logo
Photoshop
Google Sheets Logo
G-Sheets

Solution

Video Discovery

We designed a new experience to showcase the brand videos for all HABITAS' properties. The user would get an engaging experience when browsing videos and deliver a better understanding of the culture and values of HABITAS.

Website homepage featuring a rustic outdoor scene with potted cacti and palm trees, text 'Live Inspired' with a call-to-action button labeled 'Watch'; navigation bar with links to 'Book Your Stay' and options to filter homes by 'All', 'Alula', 'Bacalar', 'Namibia', and 'Tulum'; sidebar titled 'Stories by Topic' with categories Art & Culture, Wellness, Food, Sustainability, and Adventure with a 'Load More' button below.

Custom Video Playback Experience

To align with the styling and branding, we designed a custom video experience. We added support to the back-end for attaching a journal to the video player. We carefully designed and developed on-hover, on-click, and on-scroll interactions to create a continuous and exceptional video playback experience.

Video playback screen showing an aerial view of two people floating in clear blue water near a rocky shoreline with the title 'STROMATOLITES' and subtitle about learning the importance of stromatolites in Laguna Bacalar, with recommended video thumbnails below.

Press Showcase

We iterated over multiple press page designs to provide the best value for the target user persona of this page.

Website layout showing Habitas press page with travel awards and features including Namibia Safari Spa, Caravan Agafay resort, New York Hudson area, and a mobile view featuring 'New Visionaries' with a beach scene and palm trees.

Multilingual Support

To cater to HABITAS' international audience, language support for Arabic and Spanish was built. In addition to supporting the languages, we made regional and cultural considerations to the design.

Website menu page with Habitas logo and 'Book Your Stay' button, showing breakfast menu selection highlighted, Arabic text describing a dish called 'Pudding Chia and Coconut' with local fruit, toasted coconut, hibiscus, ginger, cardamom, 180 calories, price 52 SAR, and dietary labels PB, GF, NF, under heading Light & Healthy.

Navigation and Footer Redesign

Conducting UX research and analyzing user behavior through Google Analytics, helped define the information architecture. Our process helped organize the navigation and footer with a clear hierarchy and improved visibility.

Website navigation menu for Habitas on the left listing sections like Our Habitas, Our Homes, Caravan, Rise, Sustainability, and more; on the right, a large window reveals a mountainous desert landscape with a pool, rocks, plants, and two people sitting by a fire.
Website footer with a sign-up section titled Join Our Family and email input, featuring navigation links for Our Homes, Opening Soon, Our Habitas, and Get Our App with an App Store download button, plus contact information for Habitas Tulum including phone, emails, address, and site links for Tulum rooms, dining, wellness, music, gallery, rituals, art & culture, and a Stay section to book your stay.

GDPR Compliance

Since the company operates in Europe, it was important for the website to be GDPR compliant. We designed the cookie consent to be non-intrusive with usability in mind. We used ethical design practices like the option to decline the cookies' consent without extra friction.

Cookie consent popup over a landscape image with dry grass, distant trees, and mountains under a warm sky, offering options to decline or accept cookies and a link to read more.

Responsive Design

Since most users on the HABITAS website were visiting it on their mobile phones, we defined interactions to provide a great user experience for mobile users.

Website screenshot for Habitas featuring an outdoor pool area with sunlit seating on a wooden deck, text about the resort's connection to Atacama's natural surroundings and cultural elements, and a mobile view showing a cozy dining area with wooden tables and benches, highlighting the restaurant named Almas and its focus on seasonal, locally sourced ingredients and wood-fired cooking.

WordPress Development

We developed a custom WordPress template to build the website. We ran performance enhancement of the website for pages with a large amount of media content. Some actions include using the 'WP Rocket' Plugin, updating to an advanced network, operating lazy load media, and using image optimization Plugins. We set up the WordPress CMS to make content management easy for HABITAS.

Website section titled 'RISE' with three images: hands harvesting roots, children playing outdoors, and a blue-green water body with surrounding land.

Results

With a successful redesign of HABITAS' website, the website has a consistent design with an improved user experience. The multilingual support broadens the user groups and generates more leads. With the redesign, the website has experienced a growth of about 300%.