Greatest Hotels
What's the Story?
Greatest Hotels was a client that approached RIT's New Media Design class to design their product idea. Each student created their proposal, including myself. The product made a high-class curation of hotel resorts utilizing Google Business Photos to immersively guide travel enthusiasts toward the most luxurious hotels in the world. This project included user testing, user feedback, and personas to create a reliable tool for business or pleasure.
Objective
Design a new visual identity, brand, and website for the client. The website aimed to curate the best hotels in the world and encouraged users to explore them with Google Business Photos and promote direct reservations rather than taking a typical referral fee. Users could learn about hotels and plan dream destinations by adding hotels to lists and virtually touring their locations and features.
Planning Process
Branding & Design
The client expressed their desire for change, both in visuals and expression. Their old branding and site were from the Adobe Flash era, and the client's goals had changed drastically. I workshopped with the client to define keywords for a Solid, Authentic, and Direct brand image.
I designed the branding and visual design with the client in mind and feedback rounds. I kept the client in the loop by creating mood boards and creative exercises to help them discover and verbalize their vision and tone.
Project Results & Retrospective
This is one of the oldest projects I've worked on. However, it used many skills I still take on in more modern forms. I still test, prototype, interview, or at least dog-food every project I work on.
Additionally, being able to guide a client through a creative discovery process to find their expression and brand was a valuable experience in design thinking and direction which I continued to build upon.
Design Deck
After discussing with the client on goals and background, I created personas and user journeys and defined the key features the product needed to accomplish the main goals. After wireframing, I tested them as prototypes with various people to gauge the goal accomplishment rate and areas of qualitative nuance. However, all the study users could accomplish their tasks in under five clicks with no distractions.