Overview
IBAHN supply digital information and entertainment services to
the hospitality industry, giving hotels around the world easy
access to digital television, high speed broadband and wireless
conferencing. Until recently, these services were only made
available via a desktop web browser.
The popularity of mobile web browsing is on the increase, so
IBAHN wanted to find a way to make the interface to their services
accessible to smartphone users. Their existing interface, designed
for desktop users, has many features, user routes and customisation
options. The key challenge was to work out how to transfer this, in
all its complexity, onto the smaller screen of the smartphone.
There are a number of things to consider when designing for
mobile. The screen is much smaller and the user is rarely sitting
at a desk. The design needs to be clear and logical, navigation
elements need to be simple, and good colour contrasts are
essential. We knew that we would have to make some changes if we
were going to engage users and provide them with a useful and
enjoyable mobile browsing experience.
We approached the task by sketching out user routes through the
existing site and examined the personas of key users, highlighting
what they wanted to achieve. We transferred our ideas into
prototypes, so that we could test our concepts and refine elements
of the navigation with clear calls to actions and buttons. Once we
were happy, we undertook user testing to ensure that the product
was able to satisfy customer needs.
We then moved into graphical user interface design. This took
into account the huge range of colour palettes and branding styles
that the hotel groups internationally would need in order to create
their own branded versions. Our team then built the mobile web
templates using CSS/Javascript and undertook cross browser testing
on a number of devices.
The outcome was a simple and sophisticated UX and GUI design for
IBAHN's new smartphone web interface. A solution that would go on
to make their services convenient for a wider audience and help the
company maintain its position as a leading provider of information
and entertainment services to hotels globally.