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Over a 2 month period, our team executed a redesign of the Mt. Baker Ski Area website. While the initial goal of project was to transfer the site from a Concrete5 to a WordPress CMS platform, we took the opportunity to enhance the user experience and visual design of the site based on customer feedback and Google Analytics data.
Operations changes relating to Covid had drastically altered the amount of operational information that the ski area needed to relay to customers as well as increasing the need for access to digital information both on and off the mountain for areas such as operations and food service.
Customer feedback collected throughout the year helped us make informed decisions about user experience issues. Key pain points were:
• An increase in daily ski area operations information challenging to navigate and confusing for user
• Clutter on homepage makes information hard to find
• Site not easily navigated via mobile devices
• Accessibility issues
We looked on Google Analytics data from the previous seasons to inform us on how our customers use our website.
• 68% of site visits are on mobile devices
• Top visited pages: Snow Report (58%), Homepage (22%)
• Web traffic peaked between 6am and 8am daily
After considering our user experience pain points and user habits, we looked at our competitors' websites. The goal of this step was to make sure that while staying in-line with existing ski area industry design systems, we were maintaining the non-corporate, community elements that set apart the Mt. Baker Ski Area.
With a site that had a lot of complexity, I designed the information architecture to give users quick links in the navigation to the most frequently visited pages.This also helps decrease the number of links needed on other pages to these top visited pages.
Knowing that the snow report was our most visited page, I addressed the issue of how to relay a large amount of operational information to the user while still making it scannable and useful. By creating sections for different types of information, I broke the content up into digestible blocks while using green and red for operations status to make them scannable and statuses recognizable.
With users visiting our site via mobile devices 68% of the time, I knew we needed to address navigation issues, responsive design, and content to improve the mobile users experience.
The updated mobile navigation layout lets users explore parent and child pages without getting lost in a maze of fly-away menus.
I also looked at ways to deliver food service menus to users to account for social distancing, reduced and rapidly changing menu offerings and limited lodge usage.
The conditions and operations at the ski area changed rapidly. Relaying the operations and safety information to users in a layered system helped to ensure that critical information would not be missed depending on what page users entered the site from. By adding a global alert popup on both desktop and mobile, I ensured that the critical information would be delivered. This system was in addition to a layered system of physical signage at the ski area itself.
As a team, we successfully completed the site redesign in the desired timeframe. Along with transferring all content to the new Wordpress platform, I was able to address the main user experience and user interface issues that we discovered while developing a new community-focus section showcasing the uniqueness of the ski area.
Visit the full site at www.mtbaker.us
Moving forward, areas that could use further exploration to enhance user experience are the management of the daily operations blocks on the snow report page and the addition of a snow report app for users to get quick info on daily ski conditions and important operations information.
