Discounted Air Fares

From the outset, Hotwire sold one kind of air product – a fairly restrictive opaque product where the customer didn’t know anything about the flight times. Consumer research confirmed the obvious – that a less opaque product would be more appealing to consumers and would probably sell better even at lower discounts. Once we had some supplier agreement, we began to rebuild our air product.

After mulling on the business objectives and a few user research data points, I formulated a few overarching UI goals. They were: 1) to answer the customers question, 2) help the customer understand the differences between our discount products and finally 3) show them our retail fares.

Selected work on the project

Design explorations and evolution

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Initially, my proposed design was a single list – sorted by price – with up front-explanations of each fare type. A grid was something that we’d seen on other retail sites (Expedia and Orbitz) and would test in the lab. After loads of testing, we scrapped the grid and the explanation bubbles to move to a design that offloaded the fare explanations to a dedicated page.

Helping customers find better fares

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Since air inventory is so volatile, customers may be searching for a trip that’s more expensive than a trip leaving a day later. This type of feature is referred to as flexible search.

Continual optimization

Since launch, Hotwire continually optimized the air product using version testing. In a live environment, we could test the effect of different designs and user flows on the performance of the air product.

Winning versions were chosen on their overall contribution margin – this metric collapsed lots of other variables like purchase rate and exit rate. See a design to optimize the air path flow (452k PDF)

Discounted Hotels

I worked on multiple versions and features of the hotel product since 2001. The most significant improvements happened towards the end of my tenure at Hotwire.

Research and design goals

The design process began with talking to consumers. Our research team talked with Priceline loyalists, Hotwire users and small-business owners. The goal was to understand why Priceline sold more room nights than we did and if the interface was a culprit. After a pricing audit and a site audit, it became clear that Priceline’s success came largely through their larger marketing spend. However, we still had a clear direction of what to improve in the hotel path: provide more hotel content, explain our opaque model better and improve neighborhood content.

Selected work on the project

Redesign gallery

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Skills

• Information architecture, UI design and Design specification
• Actionscript development
• Discount usability practices and site analysis
• Competitive analysis