Veeve
Hospitality | UK
CMS development + API integration
Responsive design implemented with a CMS, giving the marketing team full control of content publishing and website management.
Veeve, a leading service provider of short-term holiday luxury rentals, wanted to refresh their website and offer a more engaging experience to visitors. We worked with key stakeholders from their marketing, technology, and business teams to not only implement a responsive design, but also develop a user-friendly content management system that could interact with the existing APIs and booking engine.
- Remote project delivery with an offshore team
- Bespoke development and seamless integration of design, CMS and APIs
- Drag-and-drop features to custom-publish web pages
Background
Since its inception in 2011, Veeve had been renting out thousands of homes in London and Paris while hosts were away. It was easy to see the key role that its website played in not just attracting and interacting with users, but also in handling all the cogs of their tech-dependent business model.
Over the years, the site's design and features had lost their edge and by 2018, they were lagging behind their competitor’s offerings. For Veeve's marketing team, launching a simple landing page, crucial for its high-performance digital campaign, meant a three-month-long task. Publishing a web page was akin to an overly intricate project management plan; all the teams worked on different platforms and their outputs were integrated into a web page by the technology team - a process that was not just time-consuming and inefficient, but also restrictive. The outdated site was costing the company precious time in the marketing race.
Exasperated by the absence of essential features in the current site's publishing mechanisms, the marketing team's ambitious plans had stayed on the back burner. Barring a few text changes or image-change possibilities (also a prolonged process), modifying anything on the site, let alone revamping it, was turning out to be a prohibitively tiring task.
Veeve wanted a system where the marketing team was in charge of content, design and publishing, with the speed and control it needed. Time was of the essence, and the higher the marketing team's dependencies on the technology or creative teams, the lower were the chances of swift campaign roll-outs.
UIConnect, with its background in UX and tech, and a firm grip on digital marketing requirements (an essential activity for the hospitality business), was roped in to build a new solution that would transform the publishing workflow.
Key Challenges
- The business continuity requirement was the foremost challenge. The old Veeve website needed to function uninterrupted even as development on the new site continued, while developers needed access to key transaction data and functionalities for development and testing.
- All the features available on Veeve's old site had to be replicated on the new one. The old site was powered by a well-tested booking engine and APIs, so it made sense to retain them in the new site's structure. However, the old site was built on a different technology stack, while the new one had a radically different architecture and technology stack, making integration a challenge.
- The creative team had worked on a new UX that had design and content variations across media, so support for multi-device responsiveness had to be at the centre of this new publishing system.
- For the marketing team to operate, the content management system had to be intuitive - preferably drag-and-drop level easy and less technical, yet fast, with all the modern features available in the market.
- The new site needed to work at least at the same, if not a faster speed, than the original one.
- Considering there were so many site features involved, and with a multi-stack environment and third-party plug-ins at work, site performance was a challenge in its own right.
- The project had to be delivered and managed remotely.
Our Solution
"Working remotely on an offshore project which is large scale, multi-stack, complex and evolving, a robust communication and client engagement plan is a must. That a project of this nature can be delivered simply through task management or the right resource allocation is too naïve a thought.
UIConnect has invested in tools and spent considerable effort in streamlining processes and approaches for client communication. Every project delivery at UIConnect is backed by a dedicated client management team that understands the macro picture and ensures that every stakeholder, be it a client or UIConnect team member, is on the same page on understanding scope, development processes, and expected outcomes."
UIConnect has invested in tools and spent considerable effort in streamlining processes and approaches for client communication. Every project delivery at UIConnect is backed by a dedicated client management team that understands the macro picture and ensures that every stakeholder, be it a client or UIConnect team member, is on the same page on understanding scope, development processes, and expected outcomes."
Swamy
Client Engagement
UIConnect
UIConnect
Our Solution
- UIConnect discussed mutual expectations and goals, and created a compact, phase-wise delivery plan, assigning dedicated teams that would focus on CMS implementation and custom coding, UX implementation, and code migration.
- Dedicated staging and development environments with an integrated version-control were set up. Availability of development API access from the client meant that the team could carry out research, development, testing and integration activities independent of a live server, and could continue to function until final migration, ensuring business continuity throughout the new website's development.
- A separate server was set up to replicate the website's existing technology stack and mimic booking and transaction functionalities - this would be handy for developing and testing features that pre-existed on the current website.
- An exclusive SharePoint extranet was set up, with all-access to the client and working teams. Video communication channels were also set up for daily and weekly progress updates and review calls.
- A UX team that specialised in CMS implementation, page builder tools and web-development projects was chosen and assigned to work on the conversion of Adobe XD UX prototypes. All functional and UX features were unit-tested across devices and resolutions.
- Code optimisation activities were identified as a separate task and carried out at the end of the development phase at various levels. Measures included code separation to site optimisation plug-ins.
- Despite the minutiae, we didn’t forget to focus on the big picture. The digital marketing experts at UIConnect guided the development team on SEO/SEM needs to ensure they were included and in line with Veeve's digital marketing needs.
- During the handover phase, apart from documentation, the UIConnect team arranged calls with the marketing and creative teams to ensure smooth knowledge transfer.
Result
In seven months, UIConnect successfully migrated Veeve's entire site-functionality, along with the new features, to Veeve.com under Veeve's new UX framework guidelines. This was done with pixel-perfect execution across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
Success
- The marketing team at Veeve finally had almost complete control over the site with zero dependency on the technical team for day-to-day page edits or publishing needs.
- The time required for Veeve's marketing team to create, edit or publish pages to veeve.com was drastically reduced from months to just a day.
- The new site's speed and performance metrics were better than those of the previous site.
- The choice of technology stack, coding approach and selective use of third party tools made sure that the site was scalable for foreseeable future needs.
