Hotels4u.com

UX/UI work for an established online travel business, helping improve the digital experience for customers searching for and booking holiday accommodation.

Introduction

Hotels4u.com operated in the highly competitive online travel market, providing customers with a digital service for finding and booking hotel accommodation across a wide range of destinations.

My work on the project focused on UX/UI, where the challenge was to help make a potentially complex booking journey straightforward for the customer. Search, accommodation information, pricing and the progression towards booking all needed to work together as a coherent experience, providing another opportunity to apply user-centred design thinking within a transactional online service.

Designing for the Travel Booking Journey

Booking accommodation online involves a series of decisions. Customers need to search by destination and dates, compare different properties, understand what each hotel offers and feel confident about price and availability before making a booking.

The user experience therefore needed to support that decision-making process without making an already information-rich journey unnecessarily complicated.

Making Complex Information Easier to Use

My work focused on UX/UI, considering how search results, hotel information and the progression towards booking could be structured and presented more effectively.

Travel websites need to accommodate considerable amounts of information while still allowing customers to compare their options easily. Clear hierarchy, navigation and calls to action all have an important role in helping users move naturally from initial search through to selecting their accommodation.

UX in a Competitive Online Market

Hotels4u.com operated in a market where customers could readily compare alternatives across different travel websites. The quality of the digital experience was therefore an important part of the overall proposition.

The project reinforced the commercial value of good UX. Removing unnecessary friction, presenting information clearly and giving customers confidence as they progress through a transaction can benefit both the user and the business.

Read the Full Project Story

This article provides a short introduction to my UX/UI work with Hotels4u.com. For more information about the project, my role and the wider professional context, read the full Hotels4u.com project page on Mike-Speight.co.uk.