[Design Nuances] The Tuxedo hotel search experience

Last week, we announced our new search experience for hotels and flights. Today, I would like to share some of the finer design details of the new Hotels search experience.

Quick look

Similar to a blurb on the back-cover of a novel, ‘Quick look’ provides a hotel’s overview at a glance by previewing amenities, rates and thumbnail images. We’ve also added recommendations from travellers on what they love about a hotel.

Re-imagining the maps experience

We went back to the drawing board to make the maps experience faster, smarter and more usable. We also wanted to make our users more aware of the map search, so we added ‘map-cards’ to the right of the results to give users a preview of the city’s map.

Hotel details

The new Highlights tab effectively provides a snapshot of a hotel in a three column, magazine-style layout. The first column derives its inspiration from our Small World destination design. We did over 10 iterations to get the Highlights design just right and we’ll probably still be tweaking it for a while, but we think it’s a big step forward from the previous version.

We’ve added subtle touches to the navigation bar to encourage users to explore a hotel in greater detail.

The new darkroom design for photos by darkening everything and upping the contrast to put the focus squarely where it belongs — on the photos.

Our new Map tab derives inspiration and information from Small World, showing a hotel’s location in context to a destination’s sights and sounds.

Stamps and badges

Our customers loved the stamps on our booking confirmation page, so we made new stamps for the search form. The stamps are fashioned after the retro hotel signs often seen on highways in the United States. We think the stamps do a great job of highlighting elements of our Hotels product to newer customers.

We’ve also added beautiful badges for our most popular and best-selling hotels. These badges are meant to let users easily spot the best hotels when they’re scanning a list in the search results.

There’s hundreds and hundreds of little touches that we would have loved to highlight, but there’s only so many words in a blog post.

Personally, I’m proud to say that throughout the Tuxedo design process, we lived by this principle:

“Simplicity as a result of a creative process is the ultimate sophistication”
~ Leonardo da Vinci

Originally published at blog.cleartrip.com on July 12, 2013.