Gary Buck

Greenbrier

• BY admin
• April 14th, 2011

In 2010, the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, WV was undergoing a dramatic revival under the direction of new owner, Jim Justice. After rescuing the iconic resort from bankruptcy, Justice was executing a multi-million-dollar redesign that included creating a new casino and bringing a PGA tour event to their world-class golf facilities.

The Greenbrier hired Resort Technology Partners (RTP), the industry-leader in resort marketing, to create a new website to support their renovation efforts. RTP subcontracted me to create the UX strategy & design for the project and I happily joined their outstanding creative team.

One of the most significant challenges for the Greenbrier was to attract an entirely new generation of visitors who knew next to nothing about the excellence of this 233-year-old resort, while also catering to the tradition and reserved elegance demanded by the “old guard,” long-term patrons. Additionally, the Greenbrier had grown over the years to include not only the vacation destination, which encompassed the hotel, casino, spa and golf facilities, but also a real estate community and health clinic, each of which had their own brand, website and organizational structure.

After performing a comprehensive content and usability study of the multiple websites, I spoke at length with sales and marketing staff within each organization. We quizzed the Greenbrier customer service team about their history of typical customer questions and challenges, and carefully reviewed analytics of the existing website.

Several brainstorming sessions with RTP staff led to a UX strategy of “modern elegance” and a site architecture that effectively integrated the disparate business units under a single, overarching brand umbrella.

Additional conversations with the client addressed the challenges of creating and maintaining a large amount of content in an organization that was already strapped for time and resources. We envisioned a content strategy that utilized third-party solutions to create their interactive maps in both the resort and real estate business.

After thorough development of user personas, scenarios, site map and page schematics, the visual design team at RTP, under the masterful direction of Creative Director Margaret Cyphers, took over and created a completely new online experience for the Greenbrier’s target audiences. By artfully combining traditional visuals and modern technology, we developed an experience that would appeal to both old and new customers, while perfectly supporting the resort’s renovation theme of “The Greenbrier Re-Imagined.”

The client was incredibly pleased and their re-opening activities proved to be a wild success. Our project’s greater impact is with the resort’s web customers, with online revenue increasing 300% from $1M to $4.5M last year.

• tagged: RTP
• Category: CASE STUDIES

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Walmart

• BY admin
• April 14th, 2011

By 2008, Walmart had expanded their retail empire around the world, placing superstores in several countries and acquiring large retail brands in others. Their global online presence, however, was inconsistent and disjointed, presenting an odd collection of disappointing customer experiences. They hired Deloitte Consulting to develop a new global e-commerce design that would utilize best practices and user-centric design, placed on top of a technology platform that could support this worldwide effort. Deloitte, in turn, hired me as their user experience (UX) lead and Ingredient as their visual design partner.

Per my usual process, we set out to learn as much as possible about the business and their target audiences. The project was originally intended to create a single design that would accommodate customers in more than a dozen countries spread around the world, each with distinctly different shopping cultures, internet usage styles and connectivity infrastructures. This “one size fits all” attitude, along with severe time and budget constraints, would prove challenging throughout the project.

After meetings with the corporate brand group in Bentonville, AR, we learned that Walmart was in the process of transitioning not only their visual brand and tagline (Save money. Live better.), but also the environmental design of the customer experience in their retail stores. Their new theme of “wider aisles” in the retail stores directed our subsequent visual designs for the global site. More importantly, we used these corporate brand materials to remind the entire team of these new values while designing the user experience of the new global e-commerce website.

Customer research efforts were brief, utilizing existing video and transcripts of interviews and focus group sessions performed previously by the corporate branding group. These were also used to remind both Walmart and Deloitte technology teams that the target audiences were not typically young, technologically-savvy, early adopters like themselves.

The team spent long hours developing the functional requirements for the complex e-commerce design. Walmart’s “ship to store” and “multiple shipping address” policies created significant challenges for the checkout experience, but working closely with Deloitte’s retail experts resulted in ground-breaking solutions. I served as the “voice of the customer” in these sessions, ensuring that the customer experience was protected and enhanced with innovative solutions.

UX design then proceeded quickly, as I mentored a group of Deloitte consultants to document the personas, scenarios, user flows and subsequent site maps and page schematics. Creating an effective information architecture and logical hierarchy for the product catalog was complicated by Walmart’s organizational structure. And their desire to generate additional revenue by selling home page banner ad space to unrelated, third-party brands provoked a particularly vocal discussion about user-centric design.

Creating a collection of “best practices” that applied to all customers in the wildly different cultures around the world was another fascinating challenge, and I vocalized my cautions and caveats about the resulting design. When the single UX design was adapted to each country, the amount of localization and globalization needed to produce a meaningful and usable shopping experience for the different audiences would be significant.

In the end, we created a e-commerce website prototype that exemplified the new Walmart brand and presented a greatly improved UX that led a high-level client executive to remark that he wanted this new design to replace the current American walmart.com website. It remains to be seen if this design will be utilized globally, though several aspects of the final design have made their way into Walmart’s Canadian website.

• tagged: Deloitte, Ingredient
• Category: CASE STUDIES

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