Martin Outfitters
Martin-Outfitters.com is the travel-oriented base for those seeking new thrills in the Wild West. Daniel Martin has a tall task: to cram as much of the Wyoming wilderness as will fit into vacation-length adventures. The task of re-telling those adventures as online content proved an equal challenge. Here’s a look at the future web presence for martin-outfitters.com.
The Process
Martin Outfitters’ digital strategy is to create an immersive experience for users, exposing all of the adventure in Wyoming. Several rounds of wireframes were tested to find the right balance of user interaction needed to capture this tone. Following user testing, I collected content and created hi-fidelity prototypes in Adobe XD.
UX Challenges
The challenge with martin-outfitters.com was this: how do we bring visitors into the Wyoming wilderness through their device? How can we recreate the adventure?
The answer seemed simple: show it to them. But scrolling through a photo gallery is an awfully one-sided experience, one with little interaction and leaving the heart of the story still unturned.
Instead, I left it up to the visitor to uncover the story. A bright “See it Yourself” button sets up our on-boarding message, and from here our visitors choose the kind of exploring that they’re up for. This becomes a sort of “Choose your own adventure” book: visitors are next greeted with a trail map and several points of interest. Map markers give descriptions of real Wyoming locations or wild game areas, and the points of interest surrounding each marker supply short videos, journal entries, and trip photos to explore. From here visitors are encouraged to keep moving along the trail and choose what happens next. And, most importantly, it does it all without any hand-holding. There are no instructions, no guidelines – just curious buttons and pure story-telling exploration.
Branding
The mark evokes tales of the Wild West with its slab-serif and peaky central symbol, but it’s the black and white contrast in those snowy mountains that really draw you in. The contrast starts to paint a picture of how huge this landscape is and seduces you to explore the whole range. It tells you about the ruggedness of the land there. And the adventure is all tied together with a set of elk antlers to finish the drama of how enormous and wild life is in the Wyoming wilderness.
