Wynn Las Vegas
Shopping Cart
The purpose of this project was to enhance the user experience providing a more congruent shopping cart experience based on common behaviors in e-commerce.
The purpose of this project was to enhance the user experience providing a more congruent shopping cart experience based on common behaviors in e-commerce.
The online booking experience for the Wynn Hotel has been a straightforward-classic online experience. Due to technical limitations, the experience isn't perfect, generating friction points, confusion, and frustration, which has led to guests abandoning their hotel rooms that are about to book, and with no way to return to it later.
Inconsistency is present while a guest is trying to book a room.
The problem is more evident because there's not a visual indicator that a room has been selected or pre-selected from a previous session. This experience changes in some sections leading to some frustration in guests.
During this process, we discovered that many other hospitality sites don't use a shopping cart as a booking experience, so we decided to include regular e-commerce sites as competitive analysis.
Our studies showed that the cart is not only a place to store items until purchase: it is a comparison table. People often use the shopping cart as a tool to help them make purchasing decisions. If it helps with regular with e-commerce sites, would it help on a hospitality one?
The users can select rooms from the informational site, this takes them to another section of the site where they can review date availability and promotional rates. If the guest abandons the booking room at this moment, the next time they open the browser they might have already a pending room to book without them knowing it.
Inconsistency in UI.
Unify the experience between the main website and the booking engine.
No easy way to retrieve previous booking sessions or visual queues to inform the user about pre-selected rooms.
Create a component that can be accessed from anywhere in the site.
The addition of a feature not commonly present in hospitality sites.
We see this as an opportunity to create a new experience for the hotel but with an already-known formula.
One of the major challenges at the beginning of this project was the need to work on a DSM at the same time. This, in the long run, will benefit any future project.
From our research, we concluded that the implementation of a Shopping Cart component could serve as a tool to book rooms, compare them, and continue previous or abandoned booking attempts. With such a popular component used on many e-commerce sites, the learning curve on our website could be minimal and, at the same time, an easier way to edit room preferences and dates.
During the low-fidelity sketches, we determined any possible scenario that could require additional screens or might need extra development for the IT team. Also is a great opportunity to incorporate new ideas and review how challenging would be to bring them to the project.
As with any other company, projects are constrained to tight deadlines and limited resources. That's the reason why I started the design process with the idea of creating a component that will serve any screen size with no alteration whatsoever, minimizing the development effort to a minimum.
We use a walkthrough prototype to test the functionality of our Shopping Cart. The test consisted of giving the testers a series of instructions to follow while browsing the prototype. There was a +95% positive feedback as result.
To make the shopping cart visible at any point of the website, I did modifications to the website's current interface, like the navigation menu. As for the first stage, I based the experience directly on a regular shopping cart, minimizing any possible cognitive load to our users.
The booking engine allows the user to book different rooms for different dates. This created a complex set of possible scenarios. For that, the cart included a summary of total items and group the rooms by trip dates.
The guest can easily review the number of guests, add-ons, or special offers that have been applied. This helps the user understand what they have selected, with clear information without abandoning their current browsing page.
The shopping cart was a particular choice that follows an "already- known" path in e-commerce sites but never in hospitality. Thanks to Wynn's innovation initiative I was able to push and try a project like this. The prototype showed positive results during user testing. The project is ready to be handed off to the development teams to be deployed soon. Although the shopping cart showed great feedback from the user, our study revealed that our website had to be enhanced further to provide a complete e-commerce experience. Due to budget and limit resources, future website improvements will be developed gradually.
