Multi-brand Hotel Properties
An international hotel conglomerate combined a content platform implementation with a web redesign across their booking engine and individual property websites. This project included 500+ custom implementations across 8 brands, each displaying 11 languages. I was the creative lead, guiding user experience research and design, information architecture, workflow design, content strategy and visual design.
The project began with reviewing previous market a user research, then synthesizing it into design principles and desired outcomes.
The client was included using a participatory design process at each stage: discovery, additional research, governance, information architecture. My favorite exercise was a late night call with executives across the globe wherein they worked through design ideas relevant to their part of the world. We used Google Sheets and multiple conference lines to deal with the access issues in some countries.
The client needed to enable hotel managers to manage their own website content while safeguarding the brand integrity over time. We leveraged the new content management system (CMS) to produce a design comprised of modular elements which would be governed at various levels of authority: brand managers, translators, property managers. Global changes could be made across brands, and elements could be data generated decreasing the human work needed from these already overwhelmed staff.
Building such a complex system with a large distributed team required highly detailed documentation. I implemented a coding system across the design artifacts which was easy for both the client and build team to follow.
Each hotel brand maintained its creative visual identity while having a consistent structure. The designs were built in a responsive framework so that they are fully functional on tablet and smart phone views. This eliminated the need for separate mobile websites across the enterprise.
With the change in content platform, we also updated the client’s mobile booking app to work with new data formats and visual content.
