THE ASK
Taj is the leader in hospitality, in authentic hospitality.
The ask was to envision an experience that is seamless, where every interaction inspires to connect to the next, where the authenticity and the warm hospitality comes alive in a never-seen-before connectedness that spans the entire journey of a person’s travel and stay.
MY ROLE
My role was to craft a design that emphasizes the authenticity of Taj, that creates brand preference, provides enormous e-commerce opportunities, enhances the quality of the service and thereby enhancing customer loyalty and engagement.
An artful digital choreography that fuses both passion and precision to produce the exceptional.
I was leading the creative track, and my responsibilities were:
Defining Design Strategies
Re-Defining Brands
Envisioning the experience for multiple touch points
Defining the User Journey
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
To re-launch a brand like TAJ and to create a differentiated digital experience to reinforce the leadership in the market, we did the analysis to understand its shortcoming and to propose the right solution.
EMOTIONAL SCHEMA
BUILDING PERSONAS
We identified the potential user groups for each brands to create the hypothetical representation of each user group to sketch the unique digital journey for each consumer type.
STORYSCAPE
A landscape of emotional and transactional experiences, where each connection inspires engagement with another, so the brand becomes part of the consumer’s story.
THE CHALLENGES
Though Taj had excellent brand recollection, it was weak in terms of social presence & digital marketing. 65% of hotel booking worldwide was on brand website. Taj website was lacking engagement, only 7% booking was happening online. Unlike its competitors Taj was not making use of digital opportunities for guests at the hotel.
Nevertheless, the challenge was to create a common thread which runs across brands. I had to come up with three unique identity for its three different brands (Taj luxury, Vivanta and Gateway) keeping the TAJ DNA in all these brands.
THE APPROACH
Considering the challenges, we created user journeys to identify the several touch points, enhancing the experience through simple interactions. We identified the end users expectations through user research and tried incorporating their needs. We identified opportunities for cross selling between brands. We also identified opportunities to make the routine process of check-out smooth and quick by quick pay through mobile, Kiosk for self check-out, showcasing merchandise that they can carry to their loved ones etc.
On the design front we first defined the Organizing Idea, Experience Principles and the Design Directions, which we had followed while designing the experience for all the three brands. We were able to create an inheritance despite of the different brand personalities.
EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES
INTUITIVE
Predictive, can anticipate
consumers’ needs. Works
with ‘human speak’ information.
EMPATHETIC
Warm, Pride in the art of
delighting the customer
– the Indian notion of
atithidevo bhava. Sincerity
and from-the-heart service.
UNIQUELY YOURS
Designed around you. Grows with you – learns and evolves over time. Understands the
context of the guest and
enables relevant experience.
SPECIAL
Enabling discovery –
giving new perspective
to a destination and the
travel. Culture Forward –
experiences rooted in the
destination and local culture.
THE DESIGN
The designs are predominately aligned with the organizing idea, which is “Warm, from the heart hospitality + Enabler of travel”. It is aligned with the experience principle at a very high level, which are Intuitive, Warm, Uniquely yours and Special.
Here I have showcased few wireframes and visual designs that we have created aligning with these principles. In the “Home page” it reflects the very character of TAJ “Warm, from the heart Hospitality” on the other hand the “Destination detail page” and “Travel inspiration article page” is aligned with “Enabler of Travel”. It also aligns with the experience principles of “Intuitive” and “Special”.
VISUAL DESIGN
