Hotels.com global navigation

May 2018


A new design that was an accessible, relevant collection of links within a clear, predictable and modern UI which was flexible enough to accommodate 89 point of sale variations and grow with the company.

The problem:

The previous design was more than 4 years old and over time more and more content had been added making it cluttered. The mobile design suffered from poor discoverability and the overall aesthetic of the header felt dated.

Objectives:
  • Improve sign in rate
  • Increase self-service for existing bookings
  • Reduce sales calls to the call centre
  • Increase flexibility for sub brands placement
  • Modernise the aesthetics of the header in line with the recent rebrand
  • Have a neutral or positive effect on conversion
The process:
  • Audit existing header
  • Competitor analysis
  • Review analytics
  • Consult stakeholders and ascertain key objectives
  • Initial wireframes
  • Initial artwork designs
  • Review with stakeholders
  • Amend designs
  • Prototype
  • Final designs
  • Present to stakeholders
  • UAT
  • Multi-variant test
  • Iterate
My role:

As lead designer on this project I worked with our analytics team and a project manager, reporting directly to the Director of Product Design and VP of Product.

I also liaised extensively with the loyalty team, global call centre team, marketing, legal and other product design pods to ensure the design was flexible enough to meet the goals of different business sectors and would grow with them.

Insights:

We found that a number of the links in the header had very low traffic and as such could be either removed or placed in a sub-level of navigation where its discoverability wouldn’t be overly hindered.

On mobile prior testing had shown that our customers found the burger icon confusing so we retained the existing avatar icon for the menu.

Considerations:

The loyalty team wanted to ensure a users loyalty tier was emphasised when logged in and post-stay review links remained discoverable.

The call centre was aiming to make a dramatic shift in the coming year from sales focused to customer service focused which allowed me to remove the phone number from the top level of navigation. We aimed to improve self-service processes for making and changing your booking on the site but we still wanted to ensure if a customer needed to speak with someone it would be easy to find the customer service number. Silver and Gold Rewards members also receive a priority number as part of their membership benefits so this still needed to be discoverable.

The icon set needed to be reviewed but was out of scope for this project. The roll out of new icons across the website and app will be part of a second release.

New, more stringent privacy laws meant we could no longer simply display a link to our cookie policy in our navigation. The cookie policy would now display as a modal which meant it could be removed from the menu.

Multivariate Test Results:

The initial test was run against a control and a variant of the control with the phone numbers removed. It was run for a total of 30 days in 4 points of sale spread across 4 different regions (USA, France, Brazil and Japan).

The first test of the header was successful and a follow up MVT was run to build off the insights gathered.

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