Our packages product was untouched since it's launch in 2003. In 2005 we had the opportunity to integrate many of the features of our new air product into the packages path. I was the design lead for the project.

Package path problems

The business goal for the project was to give a customer more control over the selection of an airfare that was bundled with a package. This makes sense - the more control a customer has over their itinerary, the more likely they are to find a product that meets their trip needs, thus the more likely they are to buy.

The challenges I saw with the project were two-fold - 1) we had a compressed schedule - with no time in the project plan for usability testing, and 2) the ambiguity about our airfare types could be exacerbated in a package.

Research on the cheap

We had a month to develop the user interface and a functional specification for the project. Given that timeframe, I wanted to read as much research as possible to come up with a list of design objectives. I worked with Expedia's usability engineers to review industry benchmark reports as well as their own usability tests. I worked with Hotwire customer care to understand the issues customers were calling about. I also reviewed the usability testing we did a year prior.

From this research I came away with a few large problems to solve. First, most websites don't communicate well what is included in the package price . "Does it include air? If so, what's the flight?". Second, our consumers were unhappy with the flight times for flights that were bundled with their package. Most of the time, package shoppers want to maximize the amount of time they're on the ground in the location. So it was important to make it clear to consumers to understand the flight bundled with their package and how to change it.

Selected work on the project

Skills

More work I did at Hotwire...