Redesigning Ritz

Our Challenge

Step one was to define overall objectives. I met with the creative team to discuss how the past attempts at the website had gone. I explained how I wanted to go about tackling this problem and giving an overview of how I would like the process to go. We had three objectives to focus on.

My role in this project was lead designer and developer. I am the only UX person and web developer at Ritz. It is my job to work with the creative team to leverage all of their skills.

Defining Our Process

I wanted a road map for journey that we were embarking on. It didn’t need to be set in stone just something that I could use to guide our focus. This is a rough outline of what I wanted to include at the very least:

  • 1. Stakeholder interview
  • 2. Content audit and current site map
  • 3. Competitor analysis
  • 4. Personas and storyboarding
  • 5. Moodboard
  • 6. Wireframe
  • 7. High fidelity prototype using Figma
  • 8. Testing of the wireframe and prototypes
roadmap for project

Research

I needed to do a site evaluation of our current site. I didn’t want to assume that we were scraping everything and starting fresh. I started with a sitemap to get an idea of where everything was and where the links were.


sitemap for ritz

Next I did a content audit of everything on the site. I recorded all the images with screenshots and stored them in figma for reference and created a google doc with all of the copy. For a small site there was an amazing amount of copy. The site is image heavy and performance suffers because of it.

Competition

I wanted to know who our competition was, not only locally, but in the entire country. My first step was Charlotte Business journal to find the top local agencies. Most were firms around the same size as ours for auto centric marketing. We do however have plenty of great competition locally. I brought the list that I had created to the creative team and asked them to pick their favorites. Wray Ward, Tattoo, and LGA came out on top. All three of these sites are visually stunning and engaging. Wray Ward in particular stands out from the crowd for its art directed content. We all agreed that it seems like they know who they are and who they are trying to attract.

Wray wards website LGA's Website Tattoo marketing's websited

Stakeholders

I scheduled a meeting with the CEO, President, and VP or Ritz to answer some inital questions to guide the content for the site. We are a marketing firm and this site is can be our best marketing tool. I gained valuable insights from this meeting. I found out about business goals for the future that won’t be added to the site but can give creative the insight to see where we are headed and try to capture a sense of forward movement in the company.

Users

I sat down with the creative team and hashed out some of our typical users loosely based on some of the clients that we service. We also made up some fictional potential clients and created a user based off of our interns that we hire on a semesterly basis.

Whiteboard of user personas

We came up with five total with ages ranging from 20 to 63 years old. These are first drafts and we will rework as the process evolves.

User 1 persona User 2 persona User 3 persona

A place for ideas

MoodboardI’m working with 3 graphic artist and a video/animations specialist on our creative team. I wanted to have a moodboard that they could upload to digitally. I made one in Figma so that we all could collaborate. I also wanted them to create art based all of the research and data that we currently have so far in our process. I wanted to keep it loose and not worry so much about does this fit on a web page. This is a huge advantage for us because these guys are talented and I wanted to leverage every advantage that we have so that we can set ourselves apart.

figma boards

Figma prototype

During a brainstorming session I started playing around with an idea and this was the result. I find that sometimes prototyping is faster that wireframing. This is a rough outline and will be changed but I think it is a good jumping off point.

User 1 persona User 3 persona User 2 persona User 3 persona User 3 persona

This is still a work in progress check back for updates