Enhancing the Guest Experience: Design-Focused Initiatives
At Aspenware, we are dedicated to elevating resort staff and guest experiences. At the core of our mission lies a strong focus on catering to the unique needs, goals, and preferences of both resorts and their valued guests.
By actively involving users throughout our development process, we ensure their valuable feedback is woven into our software's design, surpassing expectations. In our pursuit of excellence, Aspenware has embraced several initiatives to enhance the guest experience and maximize resort ROI. These include a heightened emphasis on UX design, a steadfast commitment to usability testing, and implementing an A/B testing program.
UX Design
Earlier this year, Aspenware hired a talented and experienced UX Designer, Mike Wisnowski, who began work on several projects to redesign critical elements of the Aspenware user interface. Mike's design process incorporates various design thinking methodologies, which involve iteratively empathizing with users, understanding their context, needs, and challenges, and developing solutions to address them.
User research involves an iterative process of defining problem statements, ideating potential solutions, prototyping and testing those solutions, and iterating based on user feedback. The goal is to create data-driven design interfaces that are visually appealing, intuitive, and a seamless experience. We design to enhance the user experience and boost conversion.
Usability Testing
After creating a design, Aspenware's cross-functional teams actively solicit user feedback through usability testing. In usability testing at Aspenware, our cross-functional teams, which include designers, developers, product managers, and other stakeholders, meet with testers carefully chosen to represent various guest personas. These testers complete detailed purchase flows, and we record user success rates, reactions, questions, and feedback. This data enables the team to iterate on design solutions and incorporate changes based on user insights. This iterative approach allows rapid experimentation, learning, and adaptation to create the best possible user experience.
Aspenware recently underwent a round of usability testing on a new mobile PDP design. Fifteen users representing our target personas worked through 2 booking flows, and their feedback confirmed many elements of our new design and gave us exciting ideas for future enhancements.
A/B Testing
Earlier this year, Aspenware contracted with a 3rd party to conduct A/B tests of features and UX designs at partner resorts. A/B testing, or split testing, is used in software development to compare two or more versions of a design treatment or feature to determine which performs better and facilitates data-driven decision-making. It involves dividing users into groups and exposing each group to a different variant, then analyzing the data to evaluate which variant produces the desired outcome and positively impacts the bottom line.
We've already conducted several A/B tests of new features, and the results reveal promising numbers that indicate our resort partners will see business results from these new features. Some examples of A/B testing results of new Cloud features include:
- Commerce Site Navigation header showed a 3.7% increase in purchase rate for mobile users
- Sticky Add-to-Cart showed a 9.5% increase in add-to-carts on mobile and a 4.4% increase on desktop
- Inventory Scarcity Indicators on the PDP inline calendar showed a 4.4% increase in purchases and a 1.4% lift in add-to-carts
We’re on a journey of continuous improvement as we revolutionize ski resort ecommerce and redefine the art of seamless software development. Through our careful UX design, usability, and A/B testing, we create user-centric, visually appealing, intuitive products that align with the users' needs and expectations. This approach increases the likelihood of building successful software products that resonate with users and deliver exceptional user experiences.
We’re excited to share many more new features with you as we approach the Winter 23/24 season!