All work

Website · Simpleview · 2023

Travel Tacoma

The brief was to refresh Tacoma’s web presence and drive measurable overnight stays after the pandemic, on every screen, for a marketing team that runs the site in a modular CMS.

The Travel Tacoma homepage, with Mount Rainier at dusk above the city and the words mountain, city, sea.
Role
Lead designer: UX/UI and visual design
Year
2023
Award
Gold dotCOMM Award

01

Mountain, City, Sea.

Research showed that visitors struggled to find things, and that the navigation overwhelmed them, especially on phones. I organized the region around three ideas, mountain, city and sea, and built the planning paths for events, trip ideas and things to do around them.

The full Travel Tacoma homepage on desktop, with the phone version beside it.

02

From browsing to booking.

Listings filter by type, region and availability, and every hotel page leads straight to dates and rates. I streamlined the booking flow and the event search to cut drop-off.

Hotel listings with filters for bookable stays, categories and regions, featured hotels first, each with rates and a check availability button.
The Hotel Murano page, with a photo gallery, dates, rates and contact details.

03

Designed for the phone in your pocket.

The redesign was mobile first. Every template was designed for the phone as carefully as for desktop, from the menu to hotel pages and event listings.

The mobile menu, open on Regions, with search and a Book your trip button.
A hotel page on mobile, The Hotel Murano, with dates and rates.
Stay in Tacoma, a landing page with a date search and types of places to stay.
A hotel page’s details in sections, above the visitor guide and newsletter links.
Hotel listings on mobile, featured hotels first, with rates.
Things to Do in Tacoma, opening on Mount Rainier.
Restaurant listings with featured places.
Things to do by theme, and the Museum of Glass.

04

A design system the CMS can carry.

Color, type and components were built as one system for Simpleview’s CMS, so Tacoma’s team can build new pages without a developer, with accessibility built in from the start.

The color palette, grays with teal, coral and gold, each in a light and a dark shade.
The typefaces, Avenir and Roboto.
The type scale from H1 to body text, shown on a phone.
Buttons, booking widgets, social icons and the topographic and textured backgrounds.
+28%
Organic traffic
+40%
Event engagement
+37%
Hotel referral clicks
94
Average accessibility score

Where it standsLaunched ahead of schedule and under budget, and won a Gold dotCOMM Award. Results are from post-launch reporting, compared with the year before.

The long version · 2 min readHow I got hereThe brief ·What research showed ·Wireframes ·What I did ·Building it

The brief

In 2023 I led the redesign of the Travel Tacoma website on Simpleview’s Experience Design team. Simpleview builds the CMS and CRM platforms that destination marketing organizations run on. The core business goal was more overnight bookings in Pierce County. Alongside it: better mobile usability, events and seasonal itineraries that are easy to find, and more room for the team to tell Tacoma’s story.

What research showed

Analytics from the SEO team, stakeholder interviews and competitive audits pointed to the same problems:

  • Content was hard to find and poorly organized.
  • The navigation was overwhelming, especially on mobile.
  • Events and planning tools were underused and not promoted clearly.
  • Visitors had no quick way to see what Tacoma has to offer.

Wireframes

The early layout set the order of the homepage. The refined wireframes moved the booking call-out to where it would earn clicks, and gave every section a module the CMS could reuse.

The early homepage layout as labeled blocks, with notes on the booking call-out, the mountain, city, sea framework and modular storytelling, beside refined wireframes for desktop and phone.

What I did

  • Led UX/UI from the first concept through high-fidelity design and developer handoff.
  • Designed a component-based design system for the CMS, so the client controls the content without needing developers.
  • Introduced the “Mountain, City, Sea” framework to reorganize regional content and simplify the main planning flows.
  • Streamlined the booking flow and event search to reduce drop-off and make calls to action clear.
  • Worked with site analysts and developers so every solution fit both user needs and the platform.

Building it

I worked closely with the developers through the build on performance, accessibility and responsiveness. Midway through, process changes cut the development timeline, and some of the animations and interactions I had proposed were scaled back. I helped prioritize so the core flows and the design system stayed intact, and the site launched on brand and ahead of schedule. Google Lighthouse performance stayed in the high 90s on desktop and mobile.