As we researched the business goals for the upcoming redesign of the Club Wyndham web-experience, one of the key aspects desired was greater engagement on mobile devices from our owners.
The Club Wyndham timeshare product is the premier product from Wyndham Destinations and comprises the lion’s share of the company’s profits. One of the challenges with the old site was its reliance on the desktop experience in order to plan, search, and book owner’s vacations. The product team required that the upcoming redesign ensure owners have a complete experience with their ownership site regardless of device they used to engage with the company.
Team
Design Team, Brand, Marketing, IT, Operations
Problem
How do you engage with owners across all of the digital touchpoints to increase engagement while ensuring they have complete control over their ownership and relationship with Club Wyndham?
Solution
Begin all design efforts from a mobile first perspective. Although this is not a new approach for the industry, it was a sea-change for the Wyndham Destinations company to approach product design with a modern sensibility that allows complete engagement with applications regardless of the device an owner might choose to use.
As the product team reviewed the acceptance criteria for the upcoming website, one of the key things that kept surfacing from the owners was a demand for equal access to their ownership site regardless of whether they were using their computer, iPad, or phone.
This was a change from the previous ownership site, codenamed Voyager, as well as an opportunity to evolve our company’s approach to design in general. As we continue to build towards a mature enterprise design team, the requirements to introduce industry standard approaches to solving problems is necessary for success.
Although mobile-first has been a perspective for years, it was new to Wyndham Destinations and required a new approach to our business goals and solving the owners’ problems.
First and foremost it required thinking through the challenges our owners faced to manage their ownership with Club Wyndham. Understanding what their goals are and how we can streamline the tasks they wish to accomplish with the least amount of friction was a key focus for this project.
The number-one priority our owners have is the desire to search and book their vacations. Since Wyndham Destinations uses a wide variety of legacy systems, our ability to provide a truly modern experience has some limitations versus a company like AirBnB whom has built a business entirely off of a modern stack of frameworks and hardware.
Using these constraints as an opportunity became a central goal for the design team. Distilling down the simple actions that we gleaned from our user research and creating simple user journeys focused on those goals was the first step.
The second step was validating those journeys with our actual owners in sprint-based user tests. Where the previous designs went through no user testing, we planned on sprint-based user testing to validate our assumptions as well as an opportunity to correct our errors or refine those assumptions.
As we planned out user testing we also needed a system that was the lowest level of entry for our owners; although a wide demographic most of our owners are over 60 and trend towards technical neophytes. We had to ensure that the user tests became opportunities to learn from their experiences and not an tech support call trying to get them to install some prototyping software.
Although there are many options available, the one we selected was InVision. Since our teams at IBM Design were a partner with the company I had already had experience with the product and their team. Second, it required no installation of any software for our test subjects so we could focus on the tasks and ensure they had a smooth experience trying out new features and providing feedback and opinions.
The prototype below was used for Sprint 3 and focused on the search features of the new application. A user could “log into” their account select a location and dates and then navigate the returns. The prototype allowed them to see the room type as well as showcased the filtering options originally planned by the product team.
There are a couple of reasons to celebrate the initial response and success of the site: 1.) we introduced an agile approach to our development processes as we are building towards a mature enterprise design team, 2.) the introduction of user-testing throughout the project allowed us to work on the right problems that were identified by our owners, and 3.) the backlog we maintain allowed us to pivot towards experiences the owners demanded post-launch.
As our team continues to mature we will evolve our design and testing regimen, and the tools we use, to match the expectations of our owners and senior leadership to continue to evolve the products and experiences for Club Wyndham, and all of Wyndham Destinations products.