Image Credit : Kate Gordes-Watson
Project Overview
Reward Hospitality is the leading hospitality supplier in Australia and New Zealand. Its website is primarily a B2B e-commerce platform, with a growing B2C audience. Having experienced large growth in the 24 months leading up to its engagement with Luminary, Reward Hospitality was looking to capitalise on this growth with a rigorous UX process and design delivery to take its website to a best-in-class MVP build before November 2021, and a roadmap for improvements beyond. The key challenge was to uplift the overall online experience through customer insights and UX design in order to achieve significant growth in measurable performance metrics.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Account Director: Liam Thomas
Producer: Daniella Stoecher
Designer: Thom Bransom
UX: Dr Marnie Crook and Josh Smith
Strategist: Mark MacSmith
SEO: Shayna Burns
Analytics: Sarah Crooke
Project Brief
Reward Hospitality’s goals were to:
- increase average transaction value
- gain exposure in the education and aged care sectors
- focus on growing B2C
- increase website traffic
- reduce bounce rate, and
- increase sales conversion rate with a focus on mobile.
In order to optimise the online sales channel, the company sought deep insight and understanding about who its customers are, how they use (and want to use) the site and what things were both important drivers and blockers towards completing a sale and maximising the value of the sale.
Project Need
Reward Hospitality was looking for a research and design partner to work alongside its existing development supplier and across its existing platform. This required an approach that would utilise the platform’s component library as much as possible, minimising custom development.
The need was to drive a fresh vision for the website led by the customer’s perspective rather than a technology-led approach. By putting customers’ needs and expectations at the forefront of the project, the existing platform and supplier could be better directed to achieve more intuitive and satisfying sales pathways.
Tactically, the information architecture (IA) was overwhelming, search functionality limited and the site poorly optimised for mobile and accessibility. All these needs had to be resolved.
User Experience
Luminary first aligned the site structure with the mental model of Reward Hospitality’s audience, shaping a new IA that significantly reduced the mental load on users. Luminary did this by utilising card sorting to align language and structure with that which comes naturally, while reducing the amount of content exposed to users at any one time in a new navigation model.
From the research, Luminary crafted design challenges and facilitated an ideation session with Reward Hospitality stakeholders, generating features for the website that solved the key customer issues and prioritised them into an implementation roadmap.
Key insights addressed:
- increased visibility to service offerings and specials
- a new pattern and tags to communicate product availability and click & collect options
- increased visibility and simplification of the delivery process with estimates at the product level
- centralisation of product variants in a single view to reduce complexity
- new search pattern with fuzzy logic and auto-suggest to meet the browsing behaviour of customers
- new navigation, which allows users to browse deep content quickly and find products by category, brand or industry
- recommended alternatives when a product is unavailable
- additional services and USPs throughout to increase awareness, and
- allowance for checkout to sort delivery into batches.
The final design was produced alongside usability testing, and delivered as a style guide and an AA-compliant component library, utilising Reward Hospitality’s CMS provider’s widget library. The design system enabled Reward Hospitality to quickly launch its MVP, while enabling the website to be consistently scaled into the future.
Project Marketing
Reward Hospitality launched its new online platform to its large and varied customer base in November 2021 via a number of channels. These included digital marketing channels such as direct marketing communications, SEM and organic and paid social media, as well as a number of traditional marketing channels such as industry body publications and printed catalogues and flyers.
A large internal campaign was also launched to educate internal stakeholders such as the sales team about the new capabilities and features of the site.
Project Privacy
Reward Hospitality respects the privacy rights of all individuals and is committed to ensuring that all directors, managers and employees comply at all times with the requirements of the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000 and the National Privacy Principles which that Act introduces. More information about Reward Hospitality’s privacy policy can be found here: https://www.rewardhospitality.com.au/documents/PrivacyStatement_RewardHospitality.pdf
Digital - Retail & Shopping
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