The challenge
The Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) is not your average travel site. For 90 years, LHW has catered to the tastes of discerning travelers by offering a hand-selected collection of unique properties around the world that meet their customers' high standards. If you want to book a castle, palace, mountain hideaway, safari camp or private island, LHW is the white-glove travel concierge of choice.
LHW tapped my team to redefine their online experience, finding a balance between function and inspiration. I lead the team that resarched their customers' needs to strike that balance, designing the beautiful-yet-intuitive web experience that delivered on the client's ultimate goal – increased online conversions.
What they had
The existing LHW.com site was poorly equipped to meet LHW's customers' expectations. It was starkly unattractive, navigationally confusing, and didn't behave well on touch-based mobile devices. The site was plagued with ambiguity in its visual hierarchy, crippled by an unintelligible information architecture, peppered with out-of-date technology like Java applets and Flash widgets, and largely unable to get customers through the booking funnel, the site's most fundamental goal.
The one aspect of the existing site I sought to preserve was LHW's longstanding investment in high-quality photography and copywriting. My goal as to elevate it to the prominence it deserved while simultaneously wrapping it in a seamlessly-integrated booking experience.
Improving information architecture
The first and most essential purpose of the site is to enable customers to book travel. That's why the redesign began with redesigning the booking flow from square one. By studying the client site's metrics, I was able to identify the key breakdowns in their sales funnel. That intelligence informed the placement of critical gatekeeping features like registration and paywalls as well as highlighted higher-conversion opportunities to upsell services like premium annual membership.
Inspiring interaction
The LHW site is much more than a simple booking site. The brand prides itself on the depth and quality of its curation and local knowledge. Research showed that customers were interested in inspirational content, but unable to find it on the existing site. The redesign focused on doing a better job showcasing LHW's owned media content, especially the expertly-written travel guides and gorgeous photography.
After several rounds of iteration, we had a finely-tuned interaction model that invited exploration while keeping the booking engine close at hand.
Subtle interaction mechanics like an expandable map created a sense of quiet expertise to the site, echoing the brand's persona while providing the essential functionality customers need to complete the task at hand. The functional tools are there, clearly within reach, but out of the way until the customer is ready to use them.
A suitable style for a luxury brand
With a solid set of wireframes providing the skeleton for the site, the next step was developing a complementary visual aesthetic. I guided a stellar team of designers to apply a conservative, serif-centric typographic treatment and a reserved, flat color palette to the wireframes, inviting customers to immerse thIemselves in LHW's exemplary writing and photography until they're ready to buy.
The result
The redesigned website's focus on experiential booking forges an emotional connection between discerning travelers and their planning experience, delivering on the ultimate goal of decreasing user drop-off and increasing conversions, driving improvements to the client's bottom line.
