The project is for a housing marketplace company specialized in turning luxury apartments into automated, well-designed, comfortable short-stay homes. The idea for them is to combine technology and hospitality to provide the ultimate getaway experience.
Powered by technology, their core services are to provide clients with unequalled luxury hospitality experiences: provide hosting services perfect for travelers with the best of feel and comfort away from home, airport pick-up and concierge services, from apartments with kitchens and built-in cinemas to sensual spa treats.
As part of a design team to spearhead the project, we were tasked with the revamping of the platform as a whole.
The existing Double H website has become a bit outdated in it interface and experience, over-clogged, and have some difficulty in it navigation and interaction. likewise there are new services the brand provides which they needed implementing into their website upgrade.
Therefore, the brief was to revamp the company’s website such that it incorporates a thorough rebranding and improves the overall experience, integrate the new updates proposed in terms of services available to users which are not available in the existing live website.
Some of the objectives are clearly highlighted as in the following:
- Modernizing the interfaces away from the old feel and likewise the onboarding.
- Improve the User flow and Information Architecture for the website to meet the needs of the two key user personas provided by the research team.
- Maintaining the Double H brand’s identity while still presenting relevant information in every part of the design.
- Update new available services and use case to the platform (e.g blog section features).
- Ensuring the better responsiveness of the product across different device(responsive design).
I was part of the design team (4) for the project ‘primarily’ in a UI designer capacity while making and contributing in some UX decisions during the course of the project. I was tasked mainly with designing webpages going to over 17 in total, spearheading some key flows associated with these pages. Some of the pages that fell into my quota included the Booking arrangement screens, About Us page, the blog section feature (a key integration not present in the old website), FAQ page, ‘How-to guide’, Reviews and Ratings page, News letter pop ups, etc.
The entire design process was divided into 3 distinctive steps as follows:
1. Research & Ideation (Initial Phase): although series of research has been conducted by the Research team which had helped provide the basics and insights for the project brief, the Product head made it mandatory that the designers carry out user testing on the old website with a participant).
2. Prototype & Test Phase: as instructed, I was able to maneuver the entirety of the existing website and conducted a user testing with a male participant. Luckily for me, He’s an avid user of home rentals. Thus, there are specific expectations in the product from my participant which I was able to jot down before the commencement of the testing.
3. Visual Design & Handoff (Final Phase): which involved implementing the insights gathered from research, component iteration, and completing new UI for the product etc.
Team discussions were exercised after every design sprint before for the next stage of execution.
My participant highlighted that transferring users away from the website to a medium article at the click of a specific blog article is a bad experience on his part. Which was factored in given the possibility of many other users having the same impression. This brought about the inclusion of a new blog section feature for the redesign.
The about us page as informed, need not change totally as the same content from the live website is needed during the prototyping stage. Major change which I made was the alignment of the contents, more whitespace, bringing the modern look to the page and maintaining the new brand look of dark themed design.
For the blog section feature, as stated earlier, is a new inclusion based on insight from the research conducted meaning I had to come up with the whole idea from scratch. On the live website, the blog articles can only be viewed in carousel via the landing page thus, the content available to users on the website is limited as older articles couldn't be displayed in the carousel.
I drew inspiration from variety of platforms during my ideation period before implementing this section of the page. In the existing website, clicking any of the article card redirect users to the brand’s Medium account where such articles are posted.
One of the new features for the website upgrade introduced in a bid to improve customer retention. The feature is mainly to address the abandonment of booking process at a particular point due to series of possible factors which is believe to be not necessarily negative. So saving the booking for later feature was designed with a reminder meant to be sent via user’s mail address at a later time or date. The page required a bit of iteration on my part as the existing website do not have an easy-to-use interface for this feature.
FAQ, Reviews and Rating, Booking Error. Newsletter pop-ups.
As of date, Double H is a major home rental marketplace in Lagos. And the product seeks continue to serve customers with even better experience. Which is the primary aim of creating a new design. The experience was awesome and challenging. At the initial stage, it was a bit unusual and challenging for me mainly because it was the first time I will work on a project in which I had to join half way. Hence, took a lot of catching up and the effort really showed in how I was ahead of schedule on the deliverables. It was a worthwhile experience and I was satisfied with the reception from some of the stakeholders' feedbacks.
