Biltmore - OMMA Award Winning Work

In 2013, I served as the senior UX architect on a complete site redesign for Biltmore. The project started with both a content audit and an IA audit, documenting all 520 pages of their old site. Then, stakeholder meetings were held with all 23 business units vying for web visibility. Beyond the sheer size of the site, the main challenge was that a number of key business units wanted their own website. To solve this, I devised a two-tier navigation structure that allowed each key business unit to have a "homepage" within the overall Biltmore site structure. Site visitors would be able to navigate to all Biltmore had to offer without confusion, no matter which business unit's site they initially landed on.

Completed redesign as launched. The current site is the result of another redesign in 2018 and only retains some of our original IA work.

An example of the home page wireframe prior to creative work. These were functional/clickable wireframes used for early usability testing, validating my IA recommendations.

Given the unique nature of the navigation structure, I highly recommended one-on-one moderated usability testing. I built high-fidelity interactive wireframes, allowing study participants to navigate the two levels of the site naturally. We then scheduled the test over three days, with 7 participants each day. This allowed us to test the site during the day and then update the wireframes per that day's findings for the following day's test. This rapid test, refine, test, refine approach was highly successful. We were able to not only discover issues that need to be addressed but also test and validate the possible solutions. In the end, we, and more importantly, the client, were confident that our navigational design would be a success.

360 Photo of the Biltmore war room.

The next big challenge was reducing, consolidating, and simplifying the site's IA beyond the primary nav, making it easier for visitors to find what they were looking for and for the client to manage content. To do this, I duplicated the site's 23-page templates to build full site wireframes. This allowed both the client content teams and the creative teams to work in parallel, using the wireframes as a tool for content planning and creative progress tracking. To track the progress, we assembled a war room with a physical sitemap comprised of printed copies of the wireframe templates. As progress was made, the wireframe templates were replaced with creative templates one by one. Color-coded sticky notes were used to track content changes and design issues. This very tangible approach allowed each team member to work alongside one another without getting in each other's way. It also allowed project management to report up to the minimum status to the client on demand without slowing progress.

Screen shot of the Biltmore Virtual Sommelier. It was just one of many highly interactive pages needed for the Biltmore site.

The work resulted in a 41% reduction in page count, universal praise from the previously competing business units, and an OMMA award for best travel website. The IA was so successful that the client's support department spontaneously started using the new website for reference during support calls.

The "Stay" mega-nav design. This technique was very recently popularized when this was designed in 2013. The approach tested exceptionally well, leading to one of my favorite spontaneous quotes from a test subject: "I love these drop downs (mega-navs). For me, every click is a commitment. With these, I can see what I'm committing to before I click."

The agency promotional video below discusses the wider project, including targeted digital ad units and more project success metrics.