A collection of five unique hotels throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, the challenge here was to deliver a design and format that would apply to all unique properties, maintaining the corporate identity while at the same time enforcing each individual property’s unique attributes. By integrating a content management system to the website the hotels were able to provide much more useful and current information to the viewers, allowing for stronger brand integrity, and ultimately, an impressive increase in web-based bookings, following a steady rise in targeted traffic.

The property: Culloden House
Nestled just outside Inverness in Scotland, this boutique property has a rich history that extends to Bonnie Prince Charlie and then the Forbes Family. The hotel has twenty-eight rooms and suites, a fine dining restaurant and tennis court all set amongst many hectares of gardens.

After the discovery phase and multiple focus groups, the wireframes were created with a top navigation that provided the 3 most sought out links by hotel seekers in the United States and the United Kingdom; Rates & Specials, Photo Gallery and Online Booking.

After developing detailed wireframes and site specification documentation, the design phase began by creating prototypes with multiple color schemes for the different hotels. This is the color scheme selected by the client for Culloden House:

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Wireframes allow for the development of variations of a layout to maintain design consistency throughout the site. This is an important part of the initial development stage because it creates user expectations and helps to develop an awareness of and familiarity with the site.

Branding: Designed Logo

IA/UI/UX: Created Wireframe, Site Schematics & Specifications

Web Design: Created from Branding, Graphics and Wireframes.

Graphics: 8 Squash Players for Website and Marketing Material

Marketing: Email Campaign sent to over 8,000 subscribers.

The user experience of the previous product designs was impacting the company’s ability to remain competitive, so we were engaged to redesign four flagship applications. The key challenge was to develop and validate a design strategy that would push the company to develop Web 2.0 based applications, employing client-side Javascript and AJAX to deliver a rich data-driven user experience with a design that looked and behaved like a Microsoft Office application.

Instrumental to achieving success was to prototype and test critical design concepts, translate undocumented product requirements into actionable design specs and consult on the appropriate application of Web 2.0 technologies.

Services: Product Management, Information Architecture, Information Design, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Usability Research

The previous product design forced the user to search and mine for information across fourteen separate pages. The target user was accustomed to viewing lots of information using Microsoft Excel; in fact, they demanded that more information be displayed on a single page.

An innovative interaction design concept was created to enables the user to view all fourteen pages of information on a single page and provides the user with a means of controlling the information display in order to compare information and generate custom reports – a common user goal.

The engineering and quality assurance resources were working in multiple remote locations, so storyboards were created as an effective means of communicating proposed workflows and interaction designs.

Before and After: