Key to Website Design: Think Like the Consumer.

Tell us a little bit about Lotte New York Palace and what the project request was.

Because Lotte New York Palace has been a Tambourine partner for many years, I’ve been involved with their work from both a designer and art director perspective. I’ve worked with the Lotte team on their first web design project with Tambourine as well as a recent redesign we did for them. Originally, Lotte approached us with the challenge of telling the story of their iconic hotel in a digital form. The hotel has the prestige, the fame, and the looks, but the property needed help building a strong digital presence.

What made this project unique?
What made the project unique from the start was the name itself. The Lotte brand is well known for its luxurious approach, elegant touches, and attention to detail. Lotte has both a historic background with a modern, contemporary build. We made sure to tell Lotte’s story correctly by doing lots of research, moving through branding exercises to find the right typography and color adjustments that would translate well on screens, and performing a full sitemap review to ensure guests can easily navigate and find what they need.

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What was the biggest design challenge?
Lotte’s accommodations page. Lotte has various types of offerings to provide to a wide range of guests and our goal was to accommodate all guests in just a few clicks.
Here’s where it got tricky: Are you a guest simply looking for a room with no add-ons? Or, are you looking to splurge with luxurious offerings in the Royal Suite Collection?

Questions like these led us to reimagine Lotte's accommodations page. We didn’t want to overwhelm guests with too much information, but we also didn’t want to fall short of explaining how wonderful each offer was. To solve this, we worked with the Lotte team to organize the rooms into categories. We then added search filters so guests could select the size of their party and the type of experience they are looking for.

From this experience, what advice would you give to a hotelier?
Website design is successful when you think like the consumer. While you might want to include every detail about your property on your website, it could be too much information for a guest to absorb.

Take the Lotte accommodations page as an example. We worked with the Lotte team to determine the necessary rooming information we needed to include on the site. Because this property has various types of room offerings and lots of important information to include, we formulated a design solution so that the website does not over- or under-whelm the guest. The guest is always top-of-mind because that is who you are creating your website for.

What about this project are you most proud of?
The end result is beautiful (if I do say so myself). This project was a collaboration of many people from different departments and expertise, each adding a piece to this larger puzzle. We, as designers, do just one small part… we make the website look beautiful, but there are several other teams providing image curation, coding, copywriting, SEO, sitemap building, and project management (plus many more teams) that every time I see a big success project like this, I feel proud of how we were able to contribute to this larger process called website building.