2022
Hotel Hotel is a brand new(ish) art hotel in Canberra where everything in the hotel has been custom made by a selected group of Makers and Artists.
I lead the UX and UI design and digital strategy for the Hotel Hotel website, an awesome art hotel in Canberra where everything right down to the tissue box covers was custom made.
How
Given our budget for the job was quite small, we did some digging and found via previously conducted Roy Morgan research that we had a good sample of what our target audience would be. Young professionals, middle to upper class tourists, and even politicians and grey nomads were highlighted to be the personas we needed to cater for.
Given the broad spectrum of these personas, and the situations in which they might engage with the website, our deliverable needed to be engaging, easy to use and informative.
Visually this site needed to be unique - arty and different. This presented a challenge - to balance the unusual visual aesthetics with usability.
Task analysis was also part of this stage and users told us they wanted to know what features each room had, and wanted high quality imagery to give them a good feel for the spaces within the hotel. Users also told us they don’t like going to a third party site when booking, however this was a non-negotiable so we had to think of ways to make this process a little less painful.
Given these findings we started our rapid prototyping phase; tested, iterated, took the designs to high fidelity, created wireframes.
I then visited the client in Canberra to present the first round wireframes. We workshopped to fine tune the details.
Solution
Our MVP was a fully responsive site that works on all devices, and showcases everything from the Makers and Artists of the hotel, to upcoming events, features of the rooms, and gives the user a clear, user-friendly call to action to book at this hotel.
Ideally we would have had a built-in booking system within the site but to do this properly there needed to be some serious money spent. Instead, we focused on a few small details that would give confidence to the user - e.g. when selecting the check-in date, the site automatically brings up the checkout date, eliminating the need for the user to click again, implying a speedy and efficient process. From here, a similarly branded check-out process (within the limited customising and styling of the design hotels booking system) made them feel they hadn’t left the original site at all.