The Project
Luxe City Center is a boutique hotel with a prime location in Downtown Los Angeles. They had previously updated their marketing materials and needed to update their out-of-date website so it would match the new look and feel.
To kick off the project, we looked at the traffic & user flows for Luxe's current website. We found that the gallery was the highest-trafficked page, while events barely had any hits at all. The room detail pages also didn't get much traffic either, with users opting to jump straight into the booking engine from the room listing page.
That data informed our team's choices when creating an updated information architecture. We removed the room detail page altogether to get users into the booking funnel right away and made sure the new gallery layout would have a prominent call to action.
The hotel also wanted to promote their restaurant, Nixo, so we decided to incorporate dining early in the homepage scroll.
Wireframes
I began with low fidelity wireframes and initially explored two distinct layouts for the hero and navigation. While most of the client's example sites used background videos with light text overlays, I was concerned that using that pattern could cause accessibility issues.
I ended up exploring two layout concepts:
Concept One
One concept incorporated the large video but moved copy below to avoid color contrast problems. The hero would be set at around 75vh to pull the headline up above the fold.
Concept Two
This option split the hero in half & could move supporting copy into the initial viewport. I also wanted to explore a version where the video didn't autoplay. Instead, it would be user-initiated.
In addition to featuring the restaurant, Nixo, I wanted to give them a better way to manage their online menu. PDFs aren't responsive and rarely accessible, so we made the menu items custom post types.
In both versions, the booking widget would stay fixed to the bottom of the page. As the user looks to new content moving up into the viewport, they'd always have the option to book top of mind.
Style Tiles
The new marketing materials were moving into a bold, fashion-forward look & feel. I identified 3 different ways to flesh that out in interactive elements.
Comps & Prototypes
The client chose the "dark mode" style tile, since that best matched the direction their branding was moving in and embodied the younger, more fashion-forward target demographic they were after.
The Result
This site won a gold award at the 2020 Las Vegas Advertising Awards.
