Lodging Website Templates
Overview
Situation
The goal of this project was to template a series of lodging websites to provide users with a common experience between property websites. The website includes a pinned nav bar to make navigation easy to access. The site also supports a pinned “Find Lodging” tab and fly-in panel for reservations, an interactive map, and an event calendar. This project had a small budget, so personas for only one site were created as an example for the other sites.
Team and Personal Involvement
On this project, I performed discovery, UX/IA strategy development, and the Sitecore Experience manager development including a user’s guide. A visual designer took my wires and created the graphics for each website in Photoshop. The development team then created the websites and performed the front-end coding for the website template pages and their variations.
Accessibility
All sites are fully ADA/S508 compliant.
Technologies
Sitecore, Sitecore Experience Manager. Sites Deployed in 2014-2015
Tools
Axure, Sitecore CMS with Experience manager installed.
Information Architecture Development
There was not enough budget for a full persona and journey development artifacts, so I used a Customer Experience Map (CEM) to provide a map out the expected consideration journey for the most encompassing question: “How do people decide on lodging and activities for couple’s families and group events?”
Customer Experience Map (click to see full map)
Once all user needs and considerations were mapped out, the sitemap and content strategy was organized in a similar fashion to match the user’s low consideration, research, and decision making process. This was also useful in mapping out possible touch points in a digital marketing system.
Partial Sitemap (click image to see full map)
An emphasis was placed on near-by property activities discovery to generate desire to come to the area before presenting the property features and amenities.
Prototypes
This prototype template was developed in Axure using their responsive breakpoints for Desktop, Tablet and Mobile views.
Click the pictures above to view responsive prototype or website
To view the Responsive view, resize the browser to wide and then continually reduce the width of the browser until you see the Tablet and Mobile views. The tablet view has down arrows on the top menu bar to denote the switch to tap oriented menus. The wireframes were provided to the visual designer which resulted in the web page above.
Personalization – Experience Management
One of the reasons that Sitecore was chosen as a platform for these series of websites was it’s powerful personalization engine – the Experience Manager (EM, formerly known as DMS).
As stated previously, while there was a limited budget, I was able to develop personas using a series of customer profiles provided by the marketing team. I then developed personas with a set of distinguishing attributes for the personalization engine (see below).
Example Persona used in planning content, personalization and marketing strategies (Click to see larger image)
Six Personalization attributes were chosen to distinguish each persona there-by creating a “Spider” template used in the Experience Manager in matching a visitor’s actions with one of the persona spider graphs (shown below).
The Content strategy was then developed to place relevant content designed to segment the audience into the persona categories (see below). When the user clicked on various content items on the site, the personalization engine would tally a persona score for the visitor.
Content Scoring table for Grand Canyon website persona attributes (click to see larger image)
After several clicks on the website, a persona profile would emerge allowing the Experience Manager to start selecting relevant content on the site and in email campaigns for the user. The table below are the various personalization techniques used on the Grand Canyon site. A detailed user’s guide was provided to the website marketing teams to set up and maintain the Experience Manager for the Lodging destination sites.
Personalization strategies for Grand Canyon site (click to see larger image)
Conclusion
The Lodging Destination website template project was very successful and still in use today.
