Product Designer, Soho House
Mar 2019 - Jan 2020 · London
Soho House is a global hotel chain and a group of private members' clubs across Europe, North America and Asia, as well as restaurants, cinemas, workspaces, spas and bedrooms.
Whilst at Soho House I was tasked with redesigning and collating the existing websites into the single destination of sohohouse.com, whilst developing and maintaining a design system.
I lead the design of the new web experience working closely with the product owner and development teams in a product squad format.
The Challenge
The goal of sohohouse.com was to increase membership applications, retain existing members, increase bedroom bookings, and increase referral traffic to our retail websites with better design and experience whilst answering to our design principles:
Informal & playful • A feeling of belonging • A sense of surprise • A human touch • Inspire
The Approach
Our cross-functional product team worked in two-week sprints with regular rituals to maximize our effectiveness. As part of our sprints, I would lead a fortnightly design studio. These sessions are time-boxed, highly interactive, fast-paced team activities across disciplines.
With the evolving information architecture, a lot of our workshop rounds centred around card sorting and content hierarchy as well as detailed benchmarking provided by all members of the team.
Following the design studio, each area of focus was explored by myself and shared with users in either a wireframe or high-fidelity prototype, to understand users' perceptions. This was either shared with existing members of ours or by acquiring participants through usertesting.com.
The Method
I developed a design system for the web experience to support both internal and external teams to ensure consistency and increase velocity across our products. This helped roll out the new brand identity .com and the members app.
The site itself was built from a limited number of components and tokens, contained within the design system. Each style and component was added to the content library so each page from a content perspective was fully customizable.
The Outcome
The new site launched in March 2020 and has seen a vast improvement in the number of users completing and submitting member applications, a 90% increase in referral traffic to the associated retail sites of Cowshed.com and SohoHome.com, and an almost 100% room occupancy due to the improved room booking interface.
The site continues to grow and improve with the development and expansion of the design system and a more detailed view of who our users are and what they’re engaging with.
See the live site here 🌶
