Where is this hotel located?

Designing a new way to present location information on Hotel Details page

Introduction

In 2019, we at Cleartrip were revamping the existing hotel details page for Desktop. The objective was to not only fix existing issues and improve the look and feel of one of our core products but it also gave us an opportunity to explore new ways to enhance the experience.

I got a chance to work on helping users understand a pivotal factor in choosing a hotel — Location, Location, Location.

Brief about the project

Background

Until now, we at Cleartrip hadn’t prioritised location information as one of the core information blocks on our Hotel Details page. As we embarked on building this feature, we decided to treat it as a Minimum Viable Product(MVP) which would evolve over time based on business data and customer feedback.

The problem

How might we help the user in building context of the location where the hotel is located?

My role and the process

1. Understanding location in the context of hotel details page : Collaborated with the product manager, my lead designer and head of design through discussions and an audit of our current design to better understand requirements and the scope of the problem.
2. Figuring out key insights through secondary research and competitive analysis: I did a competitive analysis of other Online Travel Agents(OTA) like MakeMyTrip, Expedia, Booking, GoIbibo etc. to identify their various offerings. I also conducted secondary research on travel websites like Trip advisor to understand the importance of location in choosing a hotel.
3. Experience strategy: I envisioned possible use cases and built wireframes and high fidelity mockups to address the different use cases and drive decision making.
4. Going beyond design to understand technical constraints: I experimented with querying map data from both OpenStreetMaps(OSM) and Google maps API to figure out the feasibility of our proposed solution and sharing my learnings with the engineering team.
5. UI implementation: As part of the team working on the Cleartrip design system, I shipped various components of our hotel details page and specifically oversaw the UI implementation of our proposed solution for the location block, before handing over to engineering.
6. Outcome : The final design approved by all stakeholders along with it’s UI implementation was shared with the engineering team.

Reach out to me for the complete case study

This projects is yet to go live. Due to the Non-disclosure agreement, I cannot share the detailed case study online. In case you are interested in a detailed discussion, please reach out to me on my personal ID : sarthakveggalam@gmail.com.

Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarthak-veggalam-7128827b

Thanks for coming here! Have a nice day.