Curacao Tourist Board

in 02. Discovery,03. Definition

project_ctbThe Caribbean island of Curacao is not a well-known North American tourist destination. It’s far away, hard to pronounce, and relatively obscure by comparison with better known islands. Curacao’s tourist board, the CTB, hired my team at Razorfish to develop a web site strategy that would help sell Curacao’s unique characteristics as an authentic, European-flavored Caribbean destination. Their main objective was to attract more North American visitors.

I led the user experience team in conducting interviews, both with people who have visited Curacao, and with people in the tourist industry on the island. Happily for us, those two weeks of interviews took place on the island itself, in mid-November.

During the course of our research, we discovered what it is that makes Curacao unique: its authenticity, its history, and its ties to Europe. Nowhere else in the Caribbean do you get all the usual Caribbean sun & fun PLUS Dutch architecture & history. When you visit Curacao, you’re visiting a self-contained and self-sustained place where real people live and work. You’re not herded off to the “tourist section” of the island.

Out of the research, I developed a cast of personas that represented the types of people the tourist board would want to reach with the site. Based on these personas, I guided the development of the CTB’s strategic roadmap. They helped define which features and functions should be included in which releases.

As a result of our strategy work, Razorfish was hired to continue on to design, build, and implement a complete overhaul to www.curacao.com.

October 2004 – December 2004

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Artifacts

Strategic Roadmap (excerpt) PDF, 436k

Customer lifecycle PDF, 126 k

Scope map PDF, 50k

Functionality matrix PDF, 24k

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