Denihan Hospitality

Digital Experience

Client Overview

Denihan is a nationally recognized, independent owner and operator of boutique hotels in top U.S urban markets. I was their in-house UX Designer, so I had the opportunity to work with a few boutique hotel brands for the company.

My Contributions

- Built up the User Experience practice within the organization and educated key stakeholders on user-centered designs while advocating UX best practices
- Utilized various methods such as user research, information architecture audit, and data analysis to determine where opportunities lie, reduce user struggle and increase engagement/conversions
- Created user flows and wireframes, usability readouts, low fidelity mockups, and high fidelity prototyping experiences based on business goals and design recommendations

Hotel Brands I worked with:

The decade old website was in need of a redesign and content refresh. We were tasked to move the site to a new CMS platform to reduce the IT footprint; all while redesigning the entire site to support responsive design and enhance the user experience. As the sole UX/UI designer, I was able to use color, layout and imagery to help create a compelling new experience. Working on this project was extremely interesting as it presented a lot of unique challenges, but also taught me about process and collaboration in an agile environment. With limited budget and resources, I got plentiful hands on experience—from user research to design, to development and launch.
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For the requirements gathering, I worked with several key stakeholders to define business and technical requirements for each section of the website. There were four main objectives to hit: 1) what are our business goals, 2) who is our target audience, 3) what is our content strategy, and 4) how do we unify brand consistency across the site.

I conducted competitor research, and optimized the IA using data from our analytics. I presented a new sitemap which offered a logical organization of information, while ensuring that all moving pieces were still aligned to the core business objectives. I created three unique design concepts that portrayed our credibility and innovation as a hotel partner. Finally, I worked with the developers to ensure design and development consistency.

Denihan.com

Redesigning the Corporate Site

Process and Outcome

The James Hotels went through several rebrands and website redesigns, but with each iteration, the conversions weren't sticking. We wanted to give a new visual lift, but focus on optimizing the booking widget aimed to increase engagement. We conducted usability studies and A/B testing to make sure our prototype works. The new experience is image-focused, paired with minimal copy and provided a more fresh and clean look. Our main challenge was to get users to engage and ultimately lead them into the conversion funnel. We developed personas for each scenario and was able to find 8 participants to do a quick usability study. We uncovered a few minor usability issues that helped us iterate quickly. We proceeded to validate our hypothesis with A/B testing.

Outcome: The new experience is more favorable due to its simplicity and intuitiveness with one less click.
Users love the new visual direction because it gave them "a sense of warm, approachable and welcoming vibe." The new experience showed a 63% lift in conversion of availability checks. With compression dates and limited availability, the hotel estimated an increase of $700k (over 12 months) in revenue.

The James Hotels

UX Optimization / User Testing

Process and Outcome