Parisian Luxury Hotel Transactional Website

2021

Overview

The iconic and prestigious luxury hotel sought assistance to enhance their digital presence.As the Lead UX, I engaged with the CEO, CFO, and CMO to understand their business needs, which primarily revolved around expanding their customer base for both the hotel and the online boutique. It was decided that to focus on the hotel’s website, their primary digital platform.

The Hotel project team was composed by Sales & Marketing Director, Digital Marketing Manager, Communications Director, eCommerce & Boutique Director, Food&Beverage manager, Hotel Director, with regular meeting with the board CEO, CFO, and CMO.

What I’ve done

Strategy and Approach

1. Conducted thorough desktop research on luxury hotels and their customer base, as well as performed a heuristic review of the website.

2. Collaborated with the development team to address the transactional aspects of the website. As a result of the analysis, from a User Experience perspective, I’ve suggested to:

• Enhance the user experience of the online booking process by streamlining it for quicker and easier navigation, with a focus on the home page to make booking more efficient and user-friendly.
• Increase upselling by improving access to the information about all services and amenities offered by the hotel, through contextual navigation, ensuring that guests can easily find detailed information about what the hotel has to offer.
• Optimise the website for mobile devices by implementing a mobile-first design approach, making it more user-friendly and accessible for guests who prefer to browse and book accommodations on their smartphones or tablets.
• Incorporate more emotion-based images throughout the website to create a more engaging and visually appealing experience for users, evoking a sense of connection and excitement about staying at the hotel.
• A first improvement phase as MVP to meet the above objectives, followed by an evaluation phase to instruct additional improvements.

The UX analysis was positively welcomed, resulting in the team securing the project.

Stakeholders’ Interviews: Innovation or?

3. Organised and conducted interviews with stakeholders that primarily concentrated on their perspectives regarding target customers, digital engagement, and overarching strategy.
4. Analysis interview responses, and ascertained stakeholders’ stance on innovation and enhancements in digital presence. It became evident that the positioning had significantly evolved following the discovery workshops we later facilitated, indicating a greater openness to innovation.

Discovery Workshops: Customers and Content

Due to the top level clientele, we couldn’t run a user research. Therefore, I’ve worked with the team existing knowledge to gather user requirements.

5. Analysed the website analytics and gathered data on hotel bookings and online eCommerce transactions.
6. Organised and led discovery workshops with the hotel Project team, managers and director focused on:
   • Empathy maps workshops for customer/prospects identification and profiling
   • Typical Customer Lifecycle to identify customer groups content needs and formats
   • Draft of the internal content workflow with roles and action, to assess resources.
7. Empathy mapping for each customiser groups to identify gaps and opportunities.
8. Analysed the results and identified targeted customer groups considering business goals and resources.

9. At the end of the discovery phase, on Hotel Board request, I’ve presented the Hotel project team and the Board the results with key takeaways to plan the following step.

Design: The Experience to be

10. Prepared the user journey for each of the selected target audience, with interactions, pages, and relevant content.
11. The journey have been presented the project team for validation before starting the interaction design.

12. To complete the design phase, Prepared the Hotel and eBoutique new site map and category labels
13. Defined the new website design architecture and new page layouts
14. Designed all wireframes with a mobile-first web component based approach. After couple of iterations, the designs have been approved by the project team and passed on developments
15. During the development phase I’ve supported the product owner and developers with annotated wireframes and web components framework.

5. Measuring the experience: Planning analytic data collection

16. To monitor and validate the success of the new websites, I’ve set a plan to collect Google Analytics data based on key areas of the new design.

Conclusions

After three months after going live, the Hotel project team has identified an increase of the 8% in room bookings, which confirmed the success of the project and of the newly designed user experience.