Brief
Creating a luxury user experience
Jumeirah is a Dubai national champion and an acclaimed luxury hospitality leader — operating 24 Jumeirah branded properties in eight countries. As exemplified through its flagship hotel, and global icon, Burj Al Arab, Jumeirah has transformed the way that luxury is defined.
I worked on this project with the studio Eight Inc. I worked there for 4 months where I was the lead product designer. I was working closely with the team based in Dubai, working on a two week sprint.
The problem
When a user want book a room in a particular hotel and the hotel/room isn’t available, the journey will stop at the calendar with no alternative to book any other hotel or a different room.
The user would be redirected to the homepage and would have to restart his journey from start, the user would leave the website and go to the concurrency or stop his search.
On the previous journey : a pop-up window would open with a message and the user would be redirected to the homepage with no solution and no other offers. It’s a great opportunity for Jumeirah to introduce up-sell and cross-sell.
Wireframes
The first thing that I’ve done was to find the problem and find a solution without changing the design or adding any new component.
Introducing a new functionality or using an existing component to have a better and smooth journey is the main objective. I’ve decided to play around and I’ll show you the first two routes that I’ve worked on.
This step was really important to find the final solution.
Introducing “Nearby hotels”
The ‘nearby hotel’ functionality will allow the user to not be interrupted in his journey and it will offer the user the closest rooms available.
A message will appear notifying the user that there is no room available in the hotel that he first selected but there is some availability 0.2 miles away.
Pros :
- The ‘nearby hotel’ functionality is really nice and work really well when the user is looking for a room at the room level. The up-sell is really well introduced in this scenario.
Cons :
- This journey was really long, but decided to keep exploring the “nearby” functionality.
- The unavailability should have been notify before the result page.
- The user can be confused, the unavailability of the room should be the first thing that the user should see.
Those dates are unavailable but…
The user will know that the dates that he selected are unavailable, he will be able to change his dates where he’ll have more availabilities. The user will have the choice to :
- Go to an updated calendar page with the change your dates here link
- Navigate with the existing gallery component, where the room of each hotel will be displayed.
Pros :
- The journey is shorter, the user knows that there is no availability and has the choice to change his dates or to look the hotel nearby.
Cons :
- After talking with the dev team the ‘gallery component’ would be too long and difficult to develop.
- the user can have a long list and have to scroll a lot that’s the reason why I’ve introduced a filter.
Solution
Both solutions are really interesting, playing around the journey helped me to find the perfect solution to this problem. I’ve decided to :
- Use an existing hotel listing page
- Use the location functionality
- Use the bold headline for the message instead of a box
- Use the waiting list
- Use the cross-sell and up-sell
Nearby hotel list
