Hotwire was originally designed to sell unsold travel products at discounted rates by keeping the identity of the supplier a secret until purchase. This is called an opaque product, and presented interesting design challenges to assure customers they are getting a good value, while taking some level of risk.

 

My time at Hotwire was spent as a hybrid UI and Visual Designer on both site and mobile products. The primary products sold were hotel rooms, car rentals, and air travel. All have unique design aspects from a user perspective however it's compounded by the opaque product approach. Therefore iterative designs were constantly tested with real users to understand what works and what converted to sales.

 

Mobile Web

 

With many customers using mobile devices for booking travel it was clear Hotwire needed a mobile web site. I was tasked to design the main features of the site into a new mobile specific site, optimized for users on this platform. This new site was to run on new CSS capabilities, modern frameworks, and optimizations to make it faster and use less bandwidth. Fewer inputs, taps, and screen usage allowed simpler flows to booking travel. Prototypes and user testing were leveraged to know we were heading the right direction.