Westy Self Storage

Westy Mobile mockups schowing different screens that were designed

A seamless and modern digital experience for a storage solution provider with facilities spanning across the tri-state area.

Client
Westy Self Storage

Services
Branding
UI/UX Design
Creative Strategy
Interaction Design
Graphic Design

Role
Lead Designer

Challenge

I was driven to help design a fully invigorating digital platform that combatted against the negative stereotypes that are often associated with self-storage facilities. With ununified visual assets, Westy was also not able to digitally express its customer-oriented values and modern differentiators through the previous website. In addition, Westy's online storage calculator was not intuitive, tasking our team to develop a new, advanced and user-friendly online storage calculator.

Outcome
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With a dull and dated online presence, my goal for Westy's invigorated new look was to create a striking presentation of the Westy experience in a website that not only highlights their impeccable service and state of the art facility, but also reflects it. This resulted in my team delivering a one of a kind, highly engaging, modern, and intuitive custom website.

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The Approach

Creating an intuitive online experience that reflects Westy’s contemporary, friendly, and bright ambiance.

1.0 Discovery Phase

Idenitifying the opportunity

After a fruitful project kickoff meeting with the team at Westy, my team members and I discovered Westy's dated online presence and ununified visual assets and saw a rare opportunity to reinvigorate the brand's customer-oriented values and modern differentiators.

Scoping and understanding

To get a better understanding of why users weren't engaging with Westy's website or reaching out using their current contact form, I did my own design audit of the current web userflow. For a more personal understanding, we conducted user interviews with current and new users and discovered some interesting insights.

Crafting a solution

After reviewing all our learnings, I identified various pain-points and opportunities that could be resolved:
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⊛ Providing users with pertinent information above the fold with clear calls to action
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⊛ An intuitive navigation and a bold autoplaying video that visually takes users through the journey of storing with Westy

⊛ Creating engaging representations of Westy's many storage room options

2.0 Implementation Phase

Rebuilding old journeys

With my research insights in mind, I broke down the current design into different steps. This helped me form the information architecture and enabled me to visualize a renewed user flow.

A clean new approach to Westy's design system

Westy's design system was modernized and evolved to reflect the building exterior & interior visual elements.

3.0 Evaluation & Test Phase

Creating visual alignment on all breakpoints

With over 50 percent of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, our goal was to provide users with peace of mind in the form of a smooth and hassle-free online experience regardless of where they are. To combat slow load speeds and gaps in the mobile user experience, we optimized all images and video assets to load in smoothly on phone & tablet devices. Other optimization techniques employed were - using scalable vector graphics, creating clean levels of hierarchy for better legibility and employing lazy load for non vital images and videos.

Testing and Quality Assurance

The final and crucial step is to test the website to uncover bugs or mistakes before it goes live to ensure a smooth experience for all site visitors. This includes form input and validation, link testing, UI testing, accessibility, mobile responsiveness and functionality testing.

Key website features

Animated Room Diagrams

One of the biggest challenges for any storage solutions company is to allow their customers to visualize how they can utilize any storage space to its best potential. Our team took this opportunity to create meticulous yet exciting 3D Isometric animations illustrating each of Westy’s storage spaces. This solution provides users with spatial insight into making the most of their storage space by showcasing how everyday items can be stored away efficiently in any of Westy's many storage room options.

See it in action→

Custom Storage Calculator

To take the guess-work out of determining the best size unit for every customerwe categorized the most commonly found items around a home into different rooms and were provided with base specs for each item from the Westy team. Users can add types and quantities of each item and the storage calculator will suggest unit sizes based on the items that need to be stored in the unit.

See it in action→

Custom Photography and Videography

In collaboration with our photography partners, we were able to coordinate a fresh on-site photography and videography shoot. This allowed us to refresh the website with new visual assets including bright photos and videos and successfully showcase Westy's modern features and services, including its brightly lit grand atrium lobby and free mover concierge. These images were then optimized for web to enable fast load speeds while still maintaining the quality of all images.

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