VisitLaughlin.com Redesign

Laughlin is a different destination from Las Vegas, serving a different audience, and the design had to reflect that rather than inherit patterns from the larger site.

Desktop and mobile. Created at R&R Partners for LVCVA.

The visitors who choose Laughlin over Las Vegas are not the same people. The Laughlin audience skews older, more value-conscious, and more repeat-visitor heavy. They’re not looking for the overwhelming scale and spectacle of the Strip. They’re looking for a relaxed experience with a clear sense of what’s available and how to book it without friction.

That audience profile shaped nearly every design decision. The inspirational content layer that plays a significant role on LasVegas.com matters less here. The inventory is smaller: fewer hotels, fewer shows, a more contained set of options. The funnel is shorter and more direct. Visitors tend to know what Laughlin is and arrive closer to a booking decision, which means the design needed to get out of their way faster than its Las Vegas counterpart.

The structural approach drew from the same foundation as LasVegas.com: a DMO/OTA hybrid site with a similar information hierarchy, booking integrations, and content taxonomy. But applying that structure without adaptation would have produced a site that felt generic rather than considered.

The IA was updated to reflect the narrower inventory and more direct user intent. Navigation was simplified to reduce the overhead that makes sense on a larger site but creates unnecessary friction on a smaller one. The visual design was developed within Laughlin’s own brand identity rather than carried over from Las Vegas, finding a visual language that conveyed a different kind of appeal: laid-back, accessible, unpretentious.

Laughlin visitors on mobile are often close to or already in destination, looking for hotel availability, show times and event details, so the mobile breakpoints set the hierarchy for every screen size. The hotel detail page shows that logic in practice. On desktop it can carry a fuller content layout with supporting imagery and sidebar context. On mobile it leads with the property name, key details, and a primary booking CTA, with secondary content accessible by scrolling rather than competing for attention above the fold. The decision about what earns that above-the-fold position was made based on what a Laughlin visitor on a mobile device is most likely there to do: confirm availability and book, not browse.

The outcome was a site that finally matched the destination it represented: clear, approachable, and built around the way Laughlin’s visitors actually use it rather than scaled down from a larger template.

I was the sole designer end-to-end, covering IA, interaction design, and UI for both desktop and mobile within a fully responsive system. The real challenge was calibrating how much to adapt versus how much to preserve from the established LasVegas.com system: a judgment call that required understanding the audience difference clearly enough to defend every place where the Laughlin design diverged from the Las Vegas one.

Sole UX designerInformation architectureInteraction designUI designMobile-first responsive