Aven Hospitality is a global SaaS provider supporting over 35,000 hotels across 175+ countries. Working with the client, I designed 20 abstracted, animated schematics for their website, translating complex product capabilities into clear, engaging visual experiences for customers.
The challenge was to communicate the client's many services without exposing the underlying UX or proprietary functionality, to protect their competitive advantage, while still maintaining clarity for the hoteliers to understand their offerings. The schematics also needed to be scalable and designed as animated loops, ensuring they remained engaging without overwhelming the website experience.
This project was part of a re-brand, the previous website had basic schematics, but for this design over-haul it was important to make a visual impact, changing the schematic system. The aim was to accelerate user comprehension of the complex services, providing a digestible visual flow to understand the core product benefit in seconds. The idea was not to replicate the software, but to present an abstracted visual to communicate universally. Before diving straight into the design, we made time for a research phase, to understand how competitors utilised schematics and to understand the business goals and impact of each complex service. This was imperative to identifying the storytelling elements we wanted to visually represent in each schematic.
Working within a team of 3 designers, I led the designs of the 20 schematics, defining a consistent, scalable, visual language, and establishing style variations, and creating a component library allowing for flexibility across the different products. This approach streamlined the design process, improved collaboration, and ensured each schematic aligned with the brand's overarching design system.
Motion design was one of the requirements for these schematics, we used it to guide attention and communicate relationships across each schematic. It was important that the animations remained engaging without being overwhelming, not to distract the audience from the written web content. Therefore, I defined a motion system, the principles were a slow directional movement, progressive reveal, and subtle looping, this maintained clarity and consistency.
After rounds of iterations, all schematics were approved by the client and are now live on the website, they are a great visual accompaniment to Aven Hospitality's product offerings content. Since launch, we have been working on an additional interactive schematic, one which demonstrates how different product services can link together, and as for the schematics delivered, they have been successful in their aim. During this project I was met with skepticism on creating a component library specifically for this task, it was thought that it would take too much time. However, this system streamlined our team's approach, accelerating our process, and made it easier to work across different time zones, with the style of the design already outlined. This taught me that attention to detail on the set up will create greater team alignment and speed up the hi-fi design process.