"Simulation gave us the ability to sell this high risk, controversial project internally and get customer feedback before committing time, money and resources."

– Senior Manager, Global Product Management & User Experience

Background
The world's largest hotel group by number of rooms, this customer maintains 540,000 guest rooms at more than 3,650 hotels in 100 countries around the world. The customer relies on a network of nine major Web sites and 1,500 supporting sites to service tens of millions of customers each month. To stay ahead in the increasingly competitive travel industry, the customer embarked on one of the most progressive Web projects in its history with one paramount objective: Increase customer service and satisfaction.

Challenge
As the first hotel group to publicly present customer feedback of their own services on their Web sites, the customer did not have the luxury of modeling their program after a successful business case. In order to mitigate risk and secure executive buy-in on this controversial project, it was important to create a model of the final application and prove its effectiveness with customers before beginning development. But the customer's traditional project definition tools, static text documents and low-fidelity wire frames, led stakeholders guessing as to how the new capabilities would work.

Result
The customer modified its fundamental approach to defining and testing applications by incorporating iRise into its User-centered Design Process (UDP).

Utilizing visual simulation as a highly effective definition mechanism, the customer brought together remote stakeholders in virtual meetings to review actual use case scenarios and application flow, making the project's impact clearly visible to everyone on the team. Once approved, the customer leveraged the accurate iRise simulation to test and validate the new feature with end users before bringing it to development.

The final simulation replaced seven different documents and was delivered to development as a blueprint for what to build. The unambiguous simulation streamlined the development process, helping the development team deliver the project 30% faster than anticipated with all the features needed by the business and virtually no rework.

With iRise, the customer was able to generate over 400 unique requirements and complete user testing in a 4-week definition, testing and validation cycle. The project was approved, funded and sent to development in a time frame that was condensed by several months – one of the most rapid projects in the customer's history.