Summary
Four Seasons RV Rental was the economy rental divison of Fraserway RV. A rebrand was requested to unify the Four Seasons RV Rental Brand with Fraserway RV. A replatform was also determined to be a business need as it became a major bottleneck for content updates. No additional budgets were supplied as this was to be done in-house on top of day-to-day operations. This led to an opportunity to revisit the entire brand and website. A WordPress website was then created to resolve this problem and have been successfully integrated into the business.
01 UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXT
Interviewing Subject Matter Experts
We interviewed our subject matter experts to try and figure out what was important for their customers.
Some example questions that we asked were the following:
- What are rental customers looking for when booking an RV?
- What does rental operations need to help generate revenue?
- What are the KPIs we are using to determine success?
One of our subject matter experts has been part of the rental division since its inception and the interview process gave us a lot of insights and information about rental customers and their behaviours.
Understanding the Competition
From our interview, we identified the competition and performed a competitor analysis to better understand what the competition is doing for their customers.
Some example questions that our team had asked were the following:
- What information does our competitors have that we can easily put in place.
- What features does our competitors have that we currently do not.
- What services do we currently offer that we aren’t telling our customers.
These types of questions help us identify, how we can differentiate against our competitors.
Identifying the Platform
Updating the content manually through a code editor was not sustainable as it was built with PHP. This made it technically difficult for other team members to update the website with new offers or content. We decided on a platform that the department was familiar with so it can be easily updated by everyone else.
Information Architecture
The content of the old website was copied and analyzed to help identify themes. We also reviewed our notes from the interview to ensure that key elements noted by the subject matter experts are taken into consideration at this stage.
We defined each category and then prioritized the content balancing business goals and user needs.
User Flow
A user flow diagram was then created to help guide users through what was required to make a booking request.
02 SYNTHESIZING A SOLUTION
After reviewing all of our notes, we synthesized the research to prescribed a solution for the department.
Lo & Hi-fidelity Mockups
A lo-fidelity diagram was created in sketch to help guide users through what was required to make a booking request. A Hi-fidelity prototype was also created to help the rental department visualize the art direction and conceptual website.
03 EXECUTION
Once the concept had been approved, we created UI mockups on key template pages only for approval due to timeline and resource availability.
Staging the website
A staging site was provided by IT to facilitate testing and provide a space for us to make our updates.
Producing Design Assets
After creating the rest of the mockups, we extracted a list of images and sizes to be produced by our designer.
04 APPROVALS & FINAL REVISIONS
We sat down with the rental department to go through the new website page by page as well as give them the opportunity to further explore after the presentation.
Setting Up Google Tag Manager for Analytics and Event Tracking
Google tag manager was placed with Universal Analytics and event tracking KPIs into analytics.
05 RESULT
The website replatform was deem a success and the art direction provided by me was received favouribly by the VP of Rentals. Overall bookings and traffic have also increased as a result.