Hotel Website Flow Redesign — Part 1

redBus Hotels began in the year 2013 as a quick hack to validate the need of accommodation for bus travellers. We primarily wanted to target audience who visited the redBus website for bus bookings and may also require accommodation to stay. We saw great traction as we continue to see a good uptake of customer bookings in terms of room per nights. This prompted us to take a closer look at our customer behaviour and to provide an amazing booking experience. The hack done was patched at different places for some quick wins and was not scalable. It also accumulated a lot of technical overhead. Thus began the story of revamping our hotels booking flow!

On Dec 9th we launched our new hotels experience on redbus.in/hotels. Customers loved the new UI experience! Friends and acquaintances gave thumbs up to the flow and we also got feedback on how it can be improved further. In our upcoming posts, we will go behind the scenes and tell you all that we went through while designing the new hotel experience.

When we set out to revamp our hotels website flow, we brainstormed over areas / themes we wanted to focus upon. We looked at competitive benchmarks, industry analysis, primary user research, as well as new UI trends to understand the direction in which we wanted to move. We broadly wanted to cover these following themes:

• Inspire the user to travel (Seeing the flow)
• Maintain a consistent and pleasing design language throughout the flow
• Build a flow that is optimized for performance and scale, as well as other new features

Our primary target audience segment was focused on business travellers in the age group of 25–40, who travel regularly via bus or train to nearby cities and towns. We figured that the primary travel purpose is usually one or more of these — Sales, Business Development, and Payment Collection etc. He is, however, also interested in exploring the place if he has free time. With these goals in mind and armed with a high-level user flow, we decided to meet a few users to test it out.

To be contd..

Originally published at blog.redbus.in on January 4, 2016.