Being the thread of continuity through a many-handed redesign

Homair Vacances launched a full redesign of its website, with a twofold challenge: modernising an ageing art direction and putting user experience back at the centre of a site until then driven mainly by marketing and catalogue logic.

I was hired following this redesign push, and joined after the project had already started.

In a company where user research was not an established practice, I owned the product and UX side of this project, working directly with a freelance art director on the visual direction (already in place when I joined), Product Owners, and the in-house engineering teams on delivery.

My role on joining was to translate an external creative vision into a usable design system, remain the guardian of consistency down to the last screen shipped, and above all instil a sense of user expectation and need that didn’t exist at the project’s outset, or that was driven solely by quantitative data.

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01 · Frame

Anchoring the redesign in real needs

Framing for the whole project initially centred on internal company needs and leadership’s expectations and vision, with very little focus on the real expectations of the site’s actual consumers and users. This phase shaped the redesign’s priorities around a business axis: which information had to be visible first on product pages, which friction points of the existing site had to be fixed first. The user vision, absent when I joined, would only be brought in — on my own initiative — once the site had shipped.

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02 · Translate

Turning an art direction into a system

The new art direction was designed in collaboration with a freelance art director. My role was to translate that vision into a coherent design system, accounting for both creative fidelity and real constraints: the diversity and variable volume of content within product pages, scalability needs for the teams that would produce content after launch, and multiple SEO constraints on pages that were already content-heavy.

I then designed almost all of the site’s pages independently from that system, built hand in hand with the Product Owners.

In parallel, I defined the selection guidelines for product-page intro visuals, handed over to the marketing and communications teams, as well as the email templates in partnership with the CRM teams — two side workstreams that ensured the new identity stayed coherent beyond the website alone.

I’m currently developing a specific body of work on animations and micro-interactions to give the site an identity of its own beyond the static style guide — a direction that wasn’t planned initially, but one I’m championing to leadership and stakeholders as a strong marker of the new site’s identity.

What it demonstrates: the ability to arbitrate between creative ambition and product feasibility, and to extend a design system beyond the screen into a coherent brand language.

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03 · Hold the line

Staying the guardian to the end

Once the mockups were delivered, I stayed closely involved with the engineering teams throughout the build, running a continuous review — often under pressure — to answer every question about building components and pages.

This role let me avoid the usual drift in interpretation between design and development, and ensured the shipped site faithfully matched both the initial creative vision and the needs identified. I initiated quality testing and bug-hunting ahead of final production release, through an external provider, NSI France.

What it demonstrates: a continuous product presence through to launch, not just to the delivery of mockups.

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04

Instilling a user-centred vision

Shipping the site let me subsequently bring user research and field feedback to the forefront, launching a round of usability testing across the entire site, on an end-to-end navigation basis.

19 end users (10 in person, 9 remote) were selected across several holidaymaker profiles: couples without children, couples with children, retirees, groups of friends, with or without a pet. 6 test scenarios checked whether the site’s various modules were properly understood and used, backed by an end-of-test SUS questionnaire to give leadership a quantitative data point.

The result: success rates by scenario revealed weaknesses in the filters, real difficulty comparing different campsites, and verbatims pointing to an overly rigid search engine. Conversely, notable strengths included a site rated attractive and easy to use, an effective search engine, and a polished mobile experience. In the end, a usability score of 77/100 — clearing the 75/100 threshold — led to a clear priority matrix for product improvements: urgent, necessary, optional, minor.

What it demonstrates: these interviews showed the whole company the value and power of this exercise, surfacing friction points that hadn’t been identified before while also showcasing the work the teams had put into the entire redesign. A user-centred vision is now essential to leadership and the product team, with tools like Useberry now in place to test Figma prototypes or run SUS questionnaires.

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Outcome

The site launched with an entirely renewed visual identity and experience: strong sign-off from leadership on both function and visual finish, validation from tested users too, consistency restored across pages despite the diversity of content, and a design-system foundation reused for later productions (email, product communication).

This project illustrates my ability to carry a redesign end to end — from research to the last line of code — in a context where I had to be, at once, the executor, the translator of an external creative vision, the guardian of its proper execution, and the champion of a user-centred vision.