Hospitality Insights is a brand new platform designed to bring together the hotel investment market into one centralized hub for news and events. I was part of the process from ground zero researching, wireframing and mocking up the entire platform.
First, interested users could have browsed our media site for the latest news in hospitality; however, this site is geared toward a larger, more general audience and does not target the senior level decision makers we hoped to attract.
Next, users may have accessed individual sites for our hotel investment events (IHIF, AHC, and R&R), where users could learn more about the event and register as an attendant. However, due to each event having its own unique site, many users/attendees did not know of other similar events that may interest them.
As such, we created Hospitality Insights, a one-stop shop for hospitality news coverage and networking and is geared directly towards senior level decision makers in the hotel investment industry.
Our main target audience were hotel investors/owners, developers, management companies and franchise companies. These users are looking for ways to better their business and to network with others in the industry. As such, it was important for our site to be easy to navigate and find topical/important information; thus, we designed the site such that users can quickly find articles/events similar to ones they may already be interested in. For example, relevant event session’s detail pages were embedded within specific articles for easy user access and navigation. In order to promote user subscription, we also planned to develop exclusive content, found only on Hospitality Insights, that could drive these users to becoming a paying member.
The first block gave the users a quick and easy glance at the latest news stories in the industry.
The second block was a theme based curation of articles. This is where our editors highlighted a certain topic using a variety of mediums, including video and sponsored content.
The third block was meant to promote the next upcoming event. Here, users were able to easily jump to the event site.
The fourth block was a video block highlighting event coverage.
In the navigation, the “Attend the Event” button was key to creating the bridge between media and events. This turned into a mega menu so users could clearly see upcoming events and where they were located.
It was important for users to have a seamless experience utilizing the site while on their phones. Articles were given a larger font and line height for easier reading. Additionally, this design choice allowed for more scrolling, increasing the length of time that users remain on the site. Furthermore, we also placed recommended articles at the bottom of each article so that users could easily navigate to other items of interest, further increasing their time on the site.
Each event site was designed with the common coral color from Hospitality Insights, as well as its own unique primary color. This color choice helps to unifiy the events under Hospitality Insights but also allows for users to distinguish one event from another.
A registration button was added to the navigation of each microsite to make it easy for users to sign up for the event.
Once on the event microsite, the main goal is to get the user to register for that event; as such, there are less distractions (e.g. recommended articles or other events) than on the Hospitality Insights main page. If users would like to return to Hospitality insights, they can use the hamburger menu.
As you can see in the leftmost image, the homepage has changed quite a bit. We removed the latest news block and replaced it with membership benefit details. Since this is a completely new brand and most drives to the site are from newsletters and Google searches, most users are likely new. As such, our new homepage gives users more insight into what they can expect from the site.
We also simplified the homepage, focusing more on articles/content and less on driving people over to the event sites. This content was a mix of gated and ungated content. By doing this, we hoped to gain more memberships.
Another big change was the navigation. On the new site, we removed the hamburger menu and listed out all of the nav items. This allowed us to give more attention to our “Features” content, which was previously hidden in the navigation and more difficult for users to see.
On the old website, the “Features” content was given its own page; this page is pictured above. Although I love the design and all of the illustrations (hand drawn by me), a “Features” landing page was not practical; it garnered very few clicks, convincing us to switch to the mega menu we have now. This mega menu gives users a glimpse into the content without ever leaving the page they are on. Thus, by eliminating some clicks, this keeps users more engaged on our site.
In addition to the changes we made to the navigation on desktop, we also made some changes on mobile. The hamburger menu was moved from the left-hand side of the screen to the top right; this is because the top right is more accessible for the user to reach with their thumb and allows for easier navigation of the site.
To attract more “Insighters” (members), it was important to clearly list out all of the benefits of Hospitality Insights on our membership page. Since this is a relatively expensive membership, we wanted to highlight the “Free 60 day trial” to entice users to subscribe. Additionally, we included an FAQ section to ensure users feel more comfortable and informed with their subscription.
You can explore Hospitality Insights here.
All computer and mobile mockups were created with the help of media loot.