Explore your boundaries

Brand: World Nomads
Role: Creative Direction / Design / UX

Working as their new Creative Director my role was to continuosly support and develop the website, apps, marketing and campaign strategies. One of the most enjoyable tasks was working with the team to reimagine the brand and to set the road map for the future.

Challenge

World Nomads is more than just an online travel insurance service. At the heart of the company is a bunch of passionate travellers with a mission to enable like-minded independent travellers to live their adventures, travel safely and stay in touch.

The brief was pretty big and our aim was to build a world class brand for the future, built on the strength and momentum the team had created in the past. We wanted to build an identity that was part of their story and DNA. A way of describing World Nomads that’s true to who the people in the company are, that’s exciting, genuine and real. The last thing we wanted to create was a really boring set of ‘guidelines’, but a useful pointers to help new and existing team members. To build consistency, a stronger identity and building a better business.

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Redefining the brand

Up until my tenure as CD at World Nomads there had been no definition or clear articulation of the brand. The business had evolved organically and was primarily driven by the core business leaders and their love and passion of all things travel. As the business was beginning to scale, it was obvious that we needed a clear set of guidelines and principles.

We commissioned two amazing brand experts, Justin and Goran, from End of Work to help us through the rebranding process. The key focus was to create a clear lens in which we could define 3 core aspects:

  1. Identification: Who are we? Who needs what we do? And why should they care?
  2. Confidence: What is our brand promise? And are we able to back it up?
  3. Community:  How can we continue to bring together a passionate community of travellers who engage and relate to our brand, and in turn become our brand advocates?

The branding process involved bringing together both the functional and emotional elements of a brand, then articulating that in a set of guidelines which would enable us to reimagine the website, apps, emails advertising content and take the company forward.

The new identity communicated the core essence of the brand: a community of world nomads where travel is about pushing limits; challenging the status quo and your own perceptions; making connections; getting involved – and giving back.

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The Brand Book

The process of redefining the brand took many iterations as we dissected the various parts: evolving the identity, values, essence, colours palette, defining imagery and tone of voice.

The final output was a concise and inspirational brand book.

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Starting simple

Once the branding project was complete, this gave us the solid foundation from which we could begin the process of redesigning the website, apps, marketing and all collateral.

The first step was to translate the brand book into the online environment. As we already had an established site is seemed logical to begin by designing and building a new component library that would be responsive, maintainable and create consistency across the website marketing and media.




Bringing the brand to life

As the core components started to come together, we then began focusing on redesigning pages from the ground up. With a large multi faceted site that was running on two seperate systems, we knew that this would not be a simple overnight fix and we would need to begin a gradual transition over to the new designs.

We started with Headers and Footers. Doing card sorting exercises with customers and staff to reorganise and clean up semantics for each of the sections. Next came the purchase path; this was a great way to get the functional aspects of the component library into place quickly and start testing with users. We used a combination of wireframes, Axure prototypes and flat HTML prototypes, testing as we went. Testing usually involved interviews with 6-12 people with each round, documenting feedback and integrating changes back into the design.

Over time we transitioned the most visited content sections: scholarships, campaign and safety pages. This allowed us to start expanding the component library with Header Panels, Content boxes and Share tools. As these were some of the highest traffic pages we were able to monitor, measure and iterate to improve engagement, reduce bounce rate and increase sharing.

Impact

 

Growth

World Nomads became the fastest growing and most profitable part of the WNG business, growing over 20% year on year.

In 2016, private health insurer, nib, bought World Nomads Group, Australia’s third-largest distributor of travel insurance, for $95 million.

Engagement

After the redesign of the content pages, both visits, shares and sign ups increased considerably.

  1. Scholarship Programs increased their sign-ups by over 50% – (3500+ entries).
  2. Campaigns were boosted with over 24k of shares and an increase in sign ups.
  3. Overwhelmingly positive feedback from the travel community.
  4. 1.2 Million AUD was raised via our micro-donation program funding community development projects around the world.