Maria Stegner
Product Designer | maria.stegner@gmail.com
About the project
I worked with our PM, data analyst, editorial, marketing, and ad sales teams to design and launch a new Hotels vertical on our platform. The goals of the new channel were to:
Allow our readers to more easily find hotels in a destination they were interested in
Surface editorially curated lists of ‘Best Hotels’ in popular destinations
Showcase hotels-related editorial articles that did not have a home elsewhere on the site
Increase revenue opportunities by providing prominent placement of sponsor content
We sketched out a few different ideas, and decided that the new channel would comprise of a landing page and a search results page (below center and right):
Wireframes
My next step was to create wireframes and explore different layout configurations that would include all the various content modules we would need:
page title
search bar
editorially curated lists
sponsor highlight
thematic lists
recent articles
links to popular destinations
Below is an overview of some of the wireframe explorations I did for both the landing page, and the search results page (for desktop and mobile):
Hi fidelity mockups
Once we narrowed down the type of content we wanted to include on the landing page, I fine-tuned the visual design so that it aligned with the site’s aesthetic and branding:
One of the most important feature we built was the filtering tool, which allowed our users to focus their search based on their preference for hotel price, setting, style, and brand. We also include a sorting tool that would re-order the hotel results based on price or alphabetically:
The Results
We launched this new product in December 2018, and when we looked at the data, we noticed that the new channel resulted in:
20% decrease in bounce rate
122% increase in monthly unique visitors to the channel
39% decrease in exit rate
150% increase in page views per visit
This data showed us that we were on the right track. Our next step would be to continue to optimize and refine these templates in an iterative way to make them even better for our readers and our partners.
Project Team
UX Design - Maria Stegner
Product Manager - Anique Halliday
Engineers - Yue Weng Mak
Digital Content Director - Arabella Bowen