DIY Hive
The Country House Concierge
The Country House Concierge's website was redesigned to emphasize the company's credibility, foster user trust, and enhance navigation intuitiveness for the site's clientele.
Problem
Process
Solution
Impact
Users favored phone calls over using the website for answers, resulting in low website traffic and user engagement
The final product included a refreshed style guide, rearranged and revised copy, client testimonials, and an interactive booking calendar
Overall, the redesign enhanced navigation intuitiveness, emphasized company credibility, and ultimately bolstered user trust
We conducted research and design concepts such as:
C&C Analysis
Industry Research
Affinity Mapping
Userflow
Usability Tests
Prototyping
THE CHALLENGE
Our client's business, The Country House Concierge, primarily received inquiries via phone calls, while the website lacked traction.
We sought to understand why users preferred calling with questions instead of seeking answers on the website.
The Country House Concierge provides custom concierge & personal assistance services to clients across Shelter Island and Hamptons, NY. These services range from event planning to Airbnb cleaning to travel arrangements - all aimed to service the elite occupants, vacationers, and locals in the area.
Our client asked us to redesign their website to allow their clientele to use it as a resource to reduce user confusion. This would enable website visitors to effectively use the website without calling the business phone too frequently with questions, and ultimately allow the business to save a great deal of time.
To start, we set out to understand who the target audience was, and why the Country House Concierge's users preferred to call instead of utilizing the website.
THE DISCOVERY
We began our research with interviews...only to pivot our strategy due to a lack of interview participants & a tight deadline.
We began sourcing participants who aligned with the demographic of Country House Concierge's clientele:
Wealthy-class, high-net-worth (HNW) individuals who owned property in the Hamptons.
After multiple attempts to locate interviewees through networking, online forums, and social media, we encountered significant difficulty in reaching High-Net-Worth participants available for interviews due to their constrained schedules. With a tight deadline and bottleneck, our team decided to pivot our strategy to industry research in order to continue the project. We took away a lot of information from scholarly articles, numerous websites, blogs, and even online forums. Combined with the sparse interviews we had, we were able to move on to affinity mapping.
We organized our qualitative data, insights, and observations gathered through our industry research into a brainstorming session, also called affinity mapping, and found the following trends:
Users:
Valued assistants they could rely on and trust
Wanted to be "in-the-know" without having to do their own research
Did not want to be stressed out by small things
Did not have a lot of spare time
But the most prominent and recurring themes from our research revealed that people mostly valued trustworthiness.
THE DEFINITION
Outsourcing articles and blogs combined with online testimonies, we found that users mostly valued trustworthiness.
Putting their feedback together, we made a persona to synthesize and communicate our users' thoughts.
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Then, we generated a problem statement to summarize Hellen's main concerns and needs for a concierge service.
THE Problem
Hellen is seeking a trustworthy service that can efficiently handle minor tasks, streamline her daily schedule, and provide her with insights into the best local attractions and activities.
Therefore, Hellen can rely on her assistant and allocate her time more effectively toward her higher-priority responsibilities.
After identifying Hellen's problem, we were still stuck with finding a tangible solution -- how do we address Hellen's concerns and needs throughout The Country House Concierge's website? We started asking ourselves, "How might we" (HMW) questions to begin brainstorming potential solutions.
1
HMW design an intuitive search functionality that allows Hellen to quickly find the services she needs and the information she seeks?
2
HMW ensure that the service offers transparency, giving Hellen confidence in choosing the right services for her needs?
3
How might we help Hellen trust her concierge service?
Asking ourselves HMW questions gave us a bigger picture of what a few solutions could look like. This helped us put our questions onto paper and start sketching in a design studio - aka a brainstorming sketch session. After a few sessions of working independently, we regrouped at the end of our design studio and reviewed our proposed user interface solutions.
Proposed Solutions
Interactive booking calendar
Client reviews
Main and sub-navigation
Revised copy
Confirmation page
Call to action (CTA) buttons
Frequently asked questions
Newsletters
Reasons
Streamline booking process for users
Encourage validity & reliability
Organize categories of services
Clarify services offered
Reaffirms booking request to reduce user confusion
Clarifies website purpose & leads user to solution
Reduces user confusion
Provides updates, events, and news to encourage credibility
Solution Statement
The Country House Concierge's revised website is designed as an intuitive search interface that enables users, like Hellen, to effortlessly find trustworthy concierge and personal assistant services, as well as relevant information about local attractions.
Additionally, we added main and sub-navigation, client reviews, revised copy writing, and consistent CTA buttons to promote reliability and clarity around the company's services to reduce users' confusion.
THE Design
After evaluating The Country House Concierge's UI challenges, we made numerous UX design alterations, including a revised site layout, improved copywriting, and added both global and local design navigation.
Before
After
In total, we made 14 changes reflected in the slides below.
Home Page
Original Design
Final Mockup
Change
1
The banner image was modified to feature a welcoming gateway, symbolizing the website's role as a concierge service. We also introduced a "Book Now" call-to-action (CTA) button. This addition emphasizes the service-oriented nature of the company over products while enabling users to take swift action without the need for extensive navigation.
Change
2
Change
2
Since the entirety of the original site was on one page, we introduced a navigation bar above the banner, featuring both primary and sub-navigation options. This was implemented to enhance the user's intuitive navigation experience, alleviate cognitive strain during site exploration, and establish a clear information hierarchy, allowing users to discern prioritized content.
Change
3
Because our usability test findings showed that some users were confused about the company's purpose, we revised the website's copywriting. The goal of this revision is to provide a clear and concise articulation of Country House Concierge's services and the value it delivers to their users.
*Note: Some screenshots of the "Original Design" images are duplicate. This is because the original website had one page with no design navigation, and the "Final Mockup" pages were made from scratch.
THE Deliverable
The final mockup included a refreshed style guide, rearranged and revised copy, client, testimonials, and an interactive booking calendar.
