Archived – Liftopia – About – Quan Nguyen's Portfolio

Liftopia - About us

Lead designer, 2014
Research, UX & UI design, visual design

Drive change in the ski industry through innovative eCommerce platform

Liftopia is the largest eCommerce company in the ski industry. They work with more than 250 resorts across North America to bring lift tickets at a great value to millions of skiers, riders, and outdoor enthusiasts.

Intro

Liftopia is the leading online ski lift ticket company with a fun and unique culture. They help people spend more time doing activities they love by helping their partners running the business more effectively.

The primary goal for this project was to create a responsive website that speaks Liftopia’s identity truthfully to an inclusive audience of ski resort partners, consumers, and prospective employees.

As the lead designer, I worked on the design concept, user experience, and visual design while collaborating with others on art direction, content strategy, and implementation.

Liftopia website as of Jan 2014

Problems & key findings

I started out the project by interviewing key stakeholders and cross-functional team to identify problems we wanted to solve. We came up with a few key points:

1. Fragmented information

Partners, skier/snowboarders and the general public were sent off to different pages to get a partial view of Liftopia. This required more effort from the audience to find relevant information and from the team to manage the content.

2. Liftopia’s brand and identity

The website did not reflect Liftopia’s identity as a ski industry leader. I also noticed a disconnection between the site and the company’s culture. This observation led to questions about how do we want to represent ourselves and change our current impression in people’s mind.

3. Resources for press and contributing writers

The press and our writers frequently asked for company’s fact sheet and materials, which we then emailed or sent them to various sources (Box.net, Flickr, Dropbox). The redesign had to solve this problem.

4. Responsiveness on mobile devices

The site would need to maintain the UX integrity across screen sizes.

Making the right impression

There was a gap between how the public saw us and how we saw ourselves. To fix this, I led a round of interview to identify the top adjectives Liftopia team identified ourselves with.

Our audience

Hyper inclusive
Resorts, writers, and people thinking about working with us
Skiers/Snowboarders and outdoors enthusiasts

Ourselves

Legitimate
Fun, genuine, and authentic
Industry leader
Inclusive

Design guidelines

Using information gathered from my initial interviews with stakeholders and my competitive research, I made a couple of concept sketches to review with my team. We identified a few key points:

1. Storytelling

We wanted people to learn about Liftopia not just by numbers and data, but also by “reading” our story and connect with us via narrative storytelling.

2. Highlight our product ecosystem

Liftopia is more than the sum of our products. We are an ecosystem which benefits both skiers/snowboarders and our resort partners. The site should allow both groups to explore and to learn more about what we have to offer.

3. The team is our best asset

We have an awesome team of smart and passionate people, and we want people to know it!

4. Be visually aspirational

Use photography, patterns, and illustration to delight our viewers.

Design process

As the lead designer for this project, I was in charge of the design concept, user experience, and visual design. I collaborated with two other designers, Jen Enrique and Brendan Finlayson, on art direction, content strategy, and implementation.

1

Research & initial concepts

I interviewed stakeholders and the team to gain their perception of who we were and what Liftopia stood for
I looked at outdoors brands, ski resorts sites, and tech startups to gain an understanding of the competitive landscape and industry trends