JOHN GRAY: UX/UI/VISUAL DESIGN
Work > Hotwire
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.
Native Apps
Designing an app for iOS, and later Android, became a necessity and was demanded by our loyal customers. We wanted to design something that went beyond expectations and offered a Hotwire experience suited to the platform and superior to the website. Starting with a premise that app customers are not web customers we were able to deliver a different flow and drastically lower the number of steps to book a hotel from an iPhone. New interactions were designed to take advantage of the touchscreen interface that allowed an exploration of our opaque products that couldn't have been achieved with a website.
Responsibilities
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Wireframes for web and mobile web
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Visual design for web and mobile web in CSS
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Wireframes for mobile apps
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Visual design for mobile apps
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Rapid Prototyping
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User testing
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Icon design