LAUNCHED

December 2014

ROLE

Design Lead
Interaction Designer

AGENCY

Planet Argon

The Challenge

McMenamins owns over 50 properties in the Pacific Northwest, from Olympia to Central Oregon that range from small restaurant to full resort. Over 10 of those properties are available for the public to reserve for weddings, meetings, social and events. Within those properties are venues for large to small parties, from outside to inside a billiard hall. The objective was to increase visibility and booking.

The McMenamins Group Sales team felt their site was lacking the sophistication for it's audience. Furthermore, they felt that the design wasn't allowing users to browse through possibilities of venues, they had to individually pick a site, then learn more about it. They wanted a robust filtering tool for users to search based on amenity and descriptors.

1.

Shortly after discussing the ideas with the McMenamin's team, and regrouping internally, our team identified a better, efficient (and less costly) solution. It was true that users had to go down a rabbit hole to find information. This costed the user time, and also McMenamins time, as they had more calls and emails from users needing help and guidance. But creating a robust filtering tool didn't encourage discovery (in fact, it was more likely that users would return zero results and leave). 

Instead of a filter, I pitched a new workflow, to start with the one thing the user WOULD know; the type of event they want to have. I rearranged the process to invite and engage all users to browse, learn, book(!) AND give McMenamins more qualified leads. 

Armed with a new approach to engaging users, I identified the goals of the tool

1. engage users from wherever they are in the process; 
2. to be enticed by all options McMenamins has to offer through use of photography
3. to connect to the user, understand their needs by providing relevant content
4. to, at the end of the day, increase leads for the sales team, thus increasing sales.

2.

Once we pitched the new workflow, I was able to identify each of the pages the website currently had (that we'd need to redirect to), where it fit in the workflow, and what new pages were needed. By using a template, I could wireframe three pages (one landing, one event type landing template, and one property show by event template).

3.

The goal was to keep the pages simple and clean, and use as much photography as possible to highlight the types of events as well as the venues (as that's really what people are more curious about). 

Additionally, customized wufoo forms were embedded one every page, starting with a generic "need help" on the homepage to "I have a question about weddings at Edgefield" on that page. This gave the sales team a better idea of the type of requests coming in, and it also made the process of communication easier, once the sales team could pick up the phone. 

For each wireframe template, I identified page goals and content architecture and hierarchy to ensure overarching goals didn't get lost in the way. After sketches and wireframes, of each template they went on to our visual designer to refine and bring form to the pages.