Case study

The Eurocamp replatform

5 minute read

Client: Eurocamp (European Camping Group)
Year: 2023
Role: UX Designer, acting as product owner
Contribution: Design direction, end-to-end booking journey, migration of the design system from Axure to Figma, handoff to the build team
Team: CamdenTech built the front end into Storyblok · the incoming CMO set commercial direction · CRO manager on commercial priorities · no product owner, and no business analyst for most of the project
Platform: Web · responsive · 5 markets at launch, 13 in total

Eurocamp’s website ran on SDL Tridion, whose licence expired mid-2023. We replatformed onto Storyblok, cutting over in February 2023 with four months to spare. The new site did what it was asked to do — put parcs and prices in front of customers faster than the old one ever had. It also required dates and guests before it would show a price, which made the portfolio harder to browse for the customers who had always browsed it.

SHOT 01 · HERO The search-first results page as shipped — filters, sort, priced parc cards. Job: recognition. A reader sees what the new site actually was in one glance. Wayback Machine capture, eurocamp.co.uk, spring 2023 — or internal 2023 screenshots

Shipped 2023 The search-first results page as shipped: filters, sort, and priced parc cards.

The brief was “get off Tridion”. The actual problem was that nobody could say what the website was for.

Tridion’s licence was expiring and the front end was dated. That was the brief, and it was a deadline rather than a direction.

Underneath it sat an unresolved question: was this a lift and shift, or a rebuild around the brand? For four months the team wrote “lift and shift or new journey?” onto the project wall — four separate times, in four separate retro rounds — while requirements gathering ran on regardless. The retro records the cost in one line: “created a huge stall in what requirements we should be gathering.”

Four constraints shaped everything after:

A licence expiry, not a launch date. Mid-2023, non-negotiable, with no counterparty to appeal to.
No product owner. I filled the gap without the authority that comes with it, working alongside the CMO and the CRO manager.
No business analyst, for most of it. The group was converging its brands onto one reservation platform — Traveller to Resalys — and our BA was moved onto that programme mid-requirements. Three contract BAs were tried and none worked out. Eurocamp was running two platform migrations at once, with one analyst between them, and the website was the one that lost.
A third-party build. CamdenTech integrated the front end into Storyblok, so every design decision had to survive a handoff.

SHOT 02 · PROCESS ARTEFACT The project retro wall, August–November 2021. Job: evidence of a fork, not evidence that work happened — the same unanswered question, written four times. Phoenix Project retro board (Lucidspark) → crop the Aug–Nov 2021 red stickies

Retro board, 2021 The fork, unresolved, in the team’s own handwriting.

1“Lift & shift or new journey?” — written four separate times across four months.
2“Lack of Decision Maker” — the reason it stayed open.
3“Created a huge stall in what requirements we should be gathering” — the cost, in the team’s own words.

A new CMO settled the fork in a week that four months of workshops hadn’t.

When the incoming Chief Marketing Officer arrived, the question resolved. We pivoted to a defined commercial objective: get parcs, with prices, in front of customers as quickly and easily as possible.

That gave me something the previous four months hadn’t — a test I could hold every screen against. Search, sort and filter moved to the centre of nearly every page. Landing pages became search results, topped and tailed with SEO content. Dead ends, which were everywhere on the old site, were designed out. Progressive disclosure ran throughout: show the customer only what they need at the point they need it.

SHOT 03 · BEFORE / AFTER The same task on the old site and the new one. Job: make the change visible rather than described. Wayback Machine, pre-2023 Tridion site + 2023 capture

Left: pre-2023 · Right: shipped 2023 Old site and new, same task.

No dates and guests, no prices — which is how we made the portfolio unbrowsable.

The old website let you search with nothing entered. You could wander the portfolio, look at parcs, and decide later.

Prices need dates and party size to exist. So a site built to lead with prices had to ask for them first — and the search was designed to require them.

It worked for the objective. It also meant customers who had always browsed without committing to a date could no longer find parcs they used to find easily. The mechanism that delivered the commercial goal is the same mechanism that alienated part of the existing customer base. I don’t think that trade was avoidable given what we were asked to optimise for, but it was a trade, and we made it without user testing to tell us how much it would cost.

SHOT 04 · THE DECISION SHOT The search entry point, annotated: what is mandatory, what it unlocks, and what became unreachable without it. Job: the single most important image on the page — it carries the trade the case study turns on. New capture of the 2023 search entry point, then place pins

Shipped 2023 What the search required before it would show a price.

1Dates — mandatory. Without them there is no price to show.
2Guests — mandatory. Party size determines which accommodation can be offered at all.
3What the old site allowed here, and this one does not: browsing the portfolio with nothing entered.

Prototype slot. Ten seconds of the search as customers met it — entering dates and guests, and priced results appearing. Task-shaped, not a feature tour. Ships as <video controls muted playsinline preload="metadata" poster="…"> with no autoplay, so WCAG 2.2.2 is satisfied by construction, plus a static poster as the fallback.

To build One clip, one idea. It shows the speed the objective bought — the text supplies the cost.

I moved the design system into Figma halfway through the build, because the handoff was the bottleneck.

The design system, visuals and flows lived in Axure. It was slow to work in and error-prone, and every mistake it produced surfaced at the worst possible place — in a third-party developer’s inbox.

Nobody asked me to change it. Mid-2022, with development already running, I migrated every visual element used for handoff into Figma. Switching tooling mid-build on a deadline-bound project is a real risk, and I judged the remaining runway could absorb it. Handoff to CamdenTech got measurably faster afterwards.

SHOT 05 · SYSTEM VIEW The component library in Figma after migration. Job: the systems half of the positioning — components, variants and states, not screens. Internal Figma file, post-migration — check how far version history reaches

Rebuilt from Axure, mid-2022 The component library after the migration out of Axure.

I stripped the brand back, because a decade of individually reasonable choices had made the site incoherent.

The old website carried years of conflicting design decisions — most of them defensible when they were made, collectively a cluttered and disjointed site that no longer read as one thing.

The new visual direction went deliberately flat and minimal. That was a correction rather than a style preference, and the distinction matters: the goal was making a five-market site legible again, not making it fashionable. The alternative was carrying the incoherence onto a platform we would be living with for years.

SHOT 06 · DECISION SHOT The old site’s visual inventory against the new one — type styles, button variants and colour uses, counted. Job: turn “cluttered” from an opinion into a number. Audit both sites from Wayback captures and count

Left: pre-2023 · Right: shipped 2023 What a decade of individually reasonable decisions had accumulated.

What I rejected: lifting the old site onto the new platform.

Lift and shift was the safer answer and it was on the table for four months. It would have hit the licence date comfortably.

It would also have carried a decade of accumulated inconsistency onto a platform we’d then be stuck with, and left the commercial problem — prices being too hard to reach — exactly where it was.

SHOT 07 · THE REJECTED OPTION The lift-and-shift route and what it would have preserved. Job: prove the exploration happened. May not survive — see open items. Fallback: the retro wall crop plus text

Concept, 2021 The route we didn’t take, and what it would have carried across.

The result: off the licence, five markets — and three years of paying back what we cut.

We cut over in February 2023 and left Tridion before its licence expired. Five markets at launch, thirteen in total, one CMS, and a design system that outlived the project.

The honest half of that result is what didn’t make it. Two features were dropped for time and took years to return. My Eurocamp and the travel-agent version shipped redesigned but with reduced functionality, and the self-service customers had before — changing parc or accommodation, requesting a cancellation or amendment — never returned at all. The retro records the consequence bluntly: contact-centre volumes went up.

What we cut for time, and when it came back

Cutover February 2023 Travel took two years to return. Multistay took nearly three. The MyEC self-service never came back — and both of the features that did return were eventually rebuilt, which is the business conceding the point.

Reflection

The browsing customer is the thing I’d change. We optimised for the visitor ready to book and made the site worse for the one who wasn’t, and no user testing ran to tell us how big that group was — there was no time, so I leaned on interviews conducted on the previous site instead.

I’d also push the visual direction back toward the brand: stripping it back was the right correction, but it over-corrected. The map shipped as a results list alongside a map rather than mobile-first, which cost us in Mapbox usage as well as usability. And accessibility was an afterthought.

SHOT 08 · OUTCOME The 2026 audit’s seven critical findings, mapped to the components this project introduced. Job: corroborate the admission rather than assert it. accessiblity/ → Accessiway audit, 15 May 2026 — the seven Critical rows

Audited May 2026 A third-party audit found 206 issues across 17 templates. The critical keyboard failures sit on the date picker, the search-result cards and the map markers — the surfaces this project introduced. Remediation is underway.

Next Shipping it across thirteen markets UAT, a conversion-gated rollout, and a CMS built for thirteen markets · Eurocamp · 2023