buuteeq Introduces The Design Concierge

buuteeq is proud to introduce Design Concierge–an innovation in hotel online digital marketing. The Design Concierge revolutionizes the way hotel websites look, feel and perform. We designed the user experience of our Cloud DMS to provide three major improvements–user experience, business and web architecture. In short, with Design Concierge, your hotel enjoys:

• a faster, easier way to publish your marketing;
• a gorgeous website designed to convert browsers into guests;
• lots of different looks to choose from and details to customize;
• digital marketing that is not only beautiful to look at, but built from the ground up to function superbly and perform well on search.

An Optimized User Experience

We created The Design Concierge to find that narrow space between user control and professional design. It’s designed to improve guest usability and trust, while simultaneously having emotional appeal. We revamped our typography to aid readability while giving many font options for character. Each layout (which we call ‘Blueprints’) works with optimal color palates to ensure a consistent, professional look for every site. Our information architecture produces a layout that is easy to navigate, which encourages more direct bookings.

Better for Your Business–The Bottom Line

Our goal is to produce digital marketing that not only looks amazing but performs great and aids discoverability. With that in mind, we’ve incorporated the latest knowledge in search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that our clients perform admirably on search engines. Design Concierge is designed to convert lookers into bookers–that is our ultimate goal. To achieve this, we’ve enacted system performance upgrades and user experience innovations to reduce bounce rate and establish your unique brand so that when guests arrive on your marketing materials, they book. Our 360 Analytics are fully integrated with Design Concierge as well as many third-party booking engines, giving you the power to see exactly how well your digital marketing performs across all your online marketing channels.

 

Industrial-Strength Web Architecture

In an effort to fulfill our promise to stay on top of evolving technology trends, we’ve re-engineered how our websites work with Design Concierge. We’ve taken added steps to improve information security and system reliability. We’ve complied with web standards while ensuring cross-browser and cross device compatibility, so that your marketing materials work on all computers, browsers and mobile devices.

Chief Experience Officer Explains the Design Behind buuteeq The Design Concierge

Contact buuteeq at +1-800-734-1769 or info@buuteeq.com to learn more about buuteeq Design Concierge.

Brad Becker Introduces The Design Concierge Transcript

Hi, I’m Brad Becker, Chief Experience Officer at buuteeq. I wanted to talk today about some exciting new stuff that’s coming for our customers, and our customers’ customers. What I want to talk about right now is tentatively called the Design Concierge. The reason that we’re calling it that is because of the complexities of doing website development, channel management, all these things. Online marketing basically, digital marketing. We have a product called Cloud DMS, which is a digital marketing system for hotels, inns, and B&B’s. We have a bunch of exciting new features for the Cloud DMS plan right now, in the design and branding areas. Right now, if you want to create a hotel website, there’s a ton of things you have to think about. On the development side, you have to think about the security of the system.

Things get hacked all the time. Liability, standards compliance, cross-browser compatibility. We do a lot of work here on making sure things work across various browsers, different operating systems. Devices, there’s support for mobile, for iPad, for smartphones, Android, iPhone. It’s a really big deal now for most properties that their customers can browse, book, and look through their mobile devices. Performance, how fast is the website’s render? Content management support, how easy is it to change your content? Do you have to pay somebody every time you want to update a description or add a promotion? How long is the turn around time on it? How long is it going to take you to put a website together, or to do major renovation? Is it a two month process, or is it a two day process?  We’re on the two day side and sometimes even today. So, you can do it instantly. You can do it yourself. From the usability side in UX, for the user experience, we care about a lot of different things, and we’ve talked about that in some of the other videos.

We’ll have more to show the details of that, but today we’re actually going to show off a website or two, and you’ll be able to see how this is working out for some other properties. Then on the business side, we do a lot of data analysis on SEO and conversion, look-to-book. What’s working for our customers? What’s working with their guests? What do their guests respond to? Then, we care a lot about helping you establish your brand, what you’re all about. You can hear the bells ringing here as we have continued success, so these things are paying off for our customers, and therefore for us. Our design philosophy behind this new change, behind the Design Concierge, is based on the idea of wanting to offer professional design to people, but let them stay in control. It’s normally very tricky to have this. You have to pick one or the other. Either you’re in control and you’re doing everything yourself, and you’re wearing 40 different hats. Or, you’re hiring somebody to do it, and you’re somewhat hands off, except for just approving things.

What we think is that there’s a sweet spot, where you can give people control over their own marketing materials online, and yet still have professional design guidance kind of baked into the system. Metamorphosis is sort of a suit. You can think about a tuxedo or a suit, and how you get well-tailored looks out of this. The focus in this suit is really not on the suit itself, but on the person wearing the suit. In particular, the emphasis of a suit is on the face. Even the design of a suit is designed to draw the eye up towards the face, where all the communication is happening and the individuality is most expressed.  What’s really unique about you a lot of times, it’s really your face is the thing that other people would think of. When you think of a person that you know, what you normally think of them is their face. That’s usually what identifies them to you.

Likewise for a property, your property photography, your logo, your name, your branding, these are the things that uniquely identify your property. Then, each property has individual things about it that might make it special, its restaurant, its golf course, its location, activities around there, whatever it might be. Our philosophy is that we really want to show off what’s unique about your property. It’s not about RUI, or anything that we’re contributing, art designs, it’s really about you. It’s about your property. Also, this kind of a look is very professional, and you can see that there’s a lot of variety in there, but it’s all subtle variety because, again, the intention is to focus on the people.

Same thing with the swimsuits. Swimsuits kind of work the same way. Obviously this is an extreme example, where everybody’s the same color, but nobody looks at David Hasselhoff and whoever this guy is and says, those two guys look exactly the same because they’re wearing red trunks. Again, it’s very much that it’s about the face, the hair, the body, that makes you unique.  The clown suit is sort of the opposite. Right? This is antithetical to what we just talked about. In fact, there’s maximum variation, so you’d think that would really contribute to the individual personalities, but it really doesn’t. It actually gets in the way because what is unique about humans is really their face, some of their personality, and things that come out.

I don’t know how many, 150 muscles in the face or whatever, that we use to express ourselves with. Whereas, here that’s obscured. There are some big differences between these people and the way that they’re dressed, but it’s really superficial differences. Another example is people where costumes. Again, it’s fun, it gives you variety, but it’s not really about professionalism and it doesn’t really build trust. You wouldn’t necessarily have this person come babysit your toddler. I’m sure they’re great people, all great people, but it’s a different image that you’re putting forth. One of the first outputs of this new Design Concierge system that we have, is what we call our “panorama blueprint”. We say it’s all about you, because it is. Again, it’s about putting your property first. So, I wanted to actually take a look at an example of this. We’ve had several customers go live with this already. One of them is LQF, Le Quartier Français, there in Cape Town, South Africa. The first thing that you see is that we have really large photography, and there’s a background slide-show We also have a very prominent “Book Now” bar, because at the end of the day, we want your websites to convert. We want your look-to-book ratios to be high. You have the ability to go right to your booking engine. We have third-party booking engine integration.

Here we have a promotion switch, and so that you can whatever is important to your potential guest, you can put it right here on the homepage without it really obscuring, again, the face of your property. We really think that the logo, the name of your property, which is, again, referenced down here if it’s not part of your logo, and then the full color photography for whatever is important to you. Le Quartier Français has an award-winning chef that is there, and they have two restaurants if I remember correctly. Two fantastic restaurants there. I have not had the privilege to stay here yet. Down here you have the address card, which is really important for people to email you, call you on the phone, fax you, look up where you’re located. Also you have the ability to open this, check the kind of weather, time zone differences, social activity, and then a description of the hotel. Then, we also have kind of a menu system that we promote, where it’s a combination of custom things. For them, cuisine is really important, so it’s very prominently placed here. Then, culinary classes as well, and treats. Many properties wouldn’t have those three things there, but for this hotel, that’s what is unique about them.

Again, there’s several examples here about how we put the property first, and RUI is very unobtrusive. It just is there to dress you up like a suit, or a bathing suit, and to make you look good and to present things in a logical way. I hope you enjoyed a quick introduction to Panorama and our new Design Concierge System. Coming soon, we’ll tell you about Tuxedo, which is another blueprint. A bunch of details on how easy it is to get a site like this live in a couple of days sometimes, as opposed to several weeks or a couple of months. We look forward to hearing from any of you that are interested in knowing more about this. Thanks for your time. I’m Brad Becker, Chief Experience Officer at buuteeq. Today, we talked about the Design Concierge System. Thanks.