The objective

When we started, there were almost 6,000 hotels in the Hilton portfolio. Today, I believe that number is closer to 8,000. Migrating each individual hotel’s site using a new headless CMS allowed us to reimagine property content as reusable and shareable components.

A massive cross-functional endeavor

The all-hands-on-deck effort took partnership from every corner of the enterprise:

• Agile product team (pod)
• UX, UI and research
• Content operations
• E-commerce, our key stakeholder
• Freelance and contract copywriters
• Project managers

The scope of the project introduced me to people and orgs I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and resulted in lasting connections — so valuable in a global corporate environment.

Content governance, copywriting, and editing

I inventoried and audited the existing website and content sources, looking for areas where we could rely on our property information manager (PIM) to supply content. I facilitated the creation of new descriptive copy where structured data wouldn’t fit. The PIM was full of good info — but since many of the fields were open-text, the data needed to be cleaned up before it could be used.

To create the new descriptions, I led a team of 4 – 6 freelancers (flexing with workload) through a series of sprints. Using our research and my knowledge of best practices, I created writing guidelines and trained them to identify key selling points by using personas and desk research, as shown:

With the help of partners on the content operations team, I edited the copy and packaged it for batch import every other Friday for several months. By my back-of-a-napkin calculation, I oversaw the creation of at least 20,000 pieces of content.

Content lifecycle and stakeholder management

Hotel stakeholders were understandably cautious about all the changes. I communicated regularly and openly with the e-commerce manager and gave her thorough documentation so she could to respond to pushback and help them trust the process. She and her team worked with the hotels to clean up their PIM info and meet requirements for new content. Together, we were able to resolve issues quickly and stay agile.

I hosted workshops at key phases to explain new features and help the teams responsible for maintaining the sites minimize content debt. With access to the data that informed our design decisions, they were able to triage change requests more efficiently and prioritize their backlog.

Bringing bespoke luxury to the web

Our final obstacle to decommissioning legacy Hilton.com was a group of hotels with complex content needs. Once we’d migrated the other 99% of the hotels, I turned my attention to these.

• Luxury hotel content migration

• Refreshing optimizations for hotel website

• Solving hotel booking challenges together

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What’s included

• Background explaining what has changed and why
• Objectives for the content and its intended audience
• Content requirements including character count and terms to use or avoid
• Best-in-class examples and examples that don’t meet requirements
• Decision framework for approving and implementing changes
• Rubric for evaluating quality and value

Meetings and events

Golf

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What is the problem you’re trying to solve?

I’ve asked this question so many times, it’s become a catchphrase. But when stakeholders approach with ready-made solutions (and artifacts, sometimes!) getting to the root of the issue can reveal a different approach.

One hotel requested a feature they had on their self-hosted microsite. They wanted to replicate it on their branded site. We knew the problem the hotel was trying to solve: they wanted to make it easier for guests to book ancillary services, like spa treatments and restaurant reservations.

My team wanted to solve the same problem, just not in the same way. We knew at our phase of the journey users are seeking information, so we needed better ways to share it. The hotel’s solution presented a lot of risks: technical complexity, scalability, security, and potential operational challenges at the hotels. There was also another team working on an enterprise initiative to solve the problem.

This was a design opportunity. With our research partner, I hosted a workshop with all kinds of stakeholders: developers, product managers, delivery managers, designers and researchers working on related efforts.

What we wanted to do

• Acknowledge the hotel’s challenges and demonstrate how we are working to address them
• Understand user perceptions and behavior 
• Learn where business and user needs intersect 
• Collaborate and share information with other relevant teams 
• Strengthen relationships with cross-functional partners through shared ownership of design and product decisions

What we accomplished

From interviews our researcher identified some opportunities to improve the user experience. The team was able to create and implement those quickly and focus on big priorities. We got the insights we needed to take to the hotel partner, so the product manager could help them understand why we couldn’t do exactly what they asked. Bonus: they were excited to learn about the upcoming enhancements. These impacts don’t always translate immediately to dollar signs, but building relationships with partners and trust with stakeholders can pay dividends in the long run.

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The original site for this massive Hawaiian resort merged its official Hilton.com presence with a 128-page “microsite.” After auditing and inventorying the content, I was able to condense the site to about 27 pages. I could have gone even leaner, but wanted to assure the stakeholder that I wasn’t taking anything away — just putting things together where it made sense. 

As the platform grew and alongside it the library of available components, the time came to revisit early adopters to the platform to refresh and enhance. When we had the bandwidth to reevaluate the site’s structure and content, I had the numbers to confirm my suspicions. There were too many subpages, and people weren’t visiting them enough. Eliminating some of the pages would reduce content debt and operational effort. Even better, it would improve the UX.

Using Adobe Analytics, I made a case for better optimizing the site for mobile users, who make up about half the site’s traffic.

Low effort, high-impact optimizations

• Streamlined navigation and reduced clicks by merging five subpages into their parent pages
• Moved the hero images below the introductory copy, so users could find information before scrolling
• Component changes that enabled the use of bulleted lists and icons to make content more skimmable

Presenting these changes with the accompanying data and rationale helped the stakeholder feel like part of the design process, and helped him articulate the decisions and their benefits to his own leadership.

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The challenge

A small cohort of hotels were not effectively served by the new enterprise hotel website solution. The team was not able to migrate these hotels’ web pages to the new platform alongside the other 6,000-plus properties, which delayed the decommissioning of some legacy services. Many had contracted with the in-house creative agency or external agencies to create microsites that met their storytelling needs. However, these sites led to missed SEO value, brand dilution, contradicting info, and guest confusion.

We wanted to

• eliminate the need for microsites
• use enterprise content and property data systems for centralized updating and greater accuracy
• incorporate the terminology, taxonomies, and information architecture used on the other 6,000+ sites
• ensure adherence to guidelines for visual branding and tone of voice

What I did

• Collaborated with design partners to develop and grow a flexible component library that delivers information and images in the most usable and accessible formats
• Established guidelines, workflows, and best practices for content creation and maintenance
• Developed templates and a rapid wireframing process that allowed content editors to design and build pages quickly
• Wrote user-focused, search-informed copy infused with luxury tone and brand voice
• Led a team of content designers and acted as trainer, editor, and project manager
• Worked directly with hotel stakeholders to understand their requirements and identify how to best tell their stories

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This was a big change from the long-form, keyword-stuffed paragraphs that hotel stakeholders and other key partners were accustomed to. It required a mindset shift for our e-commerce stakeholders and the copywriters responsible for updating and maintaining hotel descriptive content.

With a UI designer’s help, I created this handbook to explain the framework for our fleet of freelancers and the teams who would be responsible for writing hotel descriptions in the long term. Cheekily named “How to Write Good,” it was the first of many documents I created for the project to help define and clarify the strategy.

Some excerpts from the 10-page handout:

Why it works

• Specific examples of what to do and what not to do give context
• Friendly tone reassures team members adapting to the new strategy
• Clear language is accessible to audiences who aren’t style, grammar, and usability geeks

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