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Tablet app screenshots

My Role

Principle UX Designer @ Tablet Hotels

During my three-year tenure at Tablet Hotels, I led transformative projects that significantly enhanced user experiences and business outcomes. Notably, I spearheaded the conversion of our website to a fully responsive design, resulting in a 12% week-over-week increase in bookings. Additionally, I led the development of our first native app, which was featured as the App of the Day on the App Store.

Below I describe my process for making the app, and although I do not describe the desktop overhaul, the process was the same.

My Design Process

I adhere to a user-centered design process, ensuring that every decision is informed by user needs and business goals.

Empathize

Recognizing that our Tablet Plus members, who accounted for 80% of our revenue, were underrepresented in our user base, I conducted in-depth interviews and surveys to understand their preferences and pain points. This research informed our design decisions and prioritized features that would deliver the most value to our core users.

Define

From our research, I developed three primary personas:

The Consultant

A frequent traveler who values premium service and often books through an assistant.

The Jetsetter Couple

Enthusiastic travelers who begin planning on mobile and finalize on desktop, utilizing maps to discover new destinations.

The Family

Travelers who prioritize convenience and cultural experiences, often using maps to find family-friendly landmarks.

These personas guided our design and development efforts, ensuring that our solutions addressed the specific needs of our target audience.

Ideate

We identified a gap in the market where many hotel booking services offered similar features without differentiation. To stand out, we introduced a social aspect by allowing users to save and share lists of their favorite hotels. This feature not only enhanced user engagement but also leveraged the passion of our customers to build a community around travel experiences.

Side note: Through discovery we learned that our Tablet Plus members often would be to embarrassed to bring up their membership status and the perks they are scheduled to receive. We then changed our customer service process by calling the hotel to remind them of the perks for our customers before they arrive resulting in happier customers.

Prototype & Test

We began with low-fidelity paper prototypes, conducting usability tests with our target users to validate concepts. Iterative testing and refinement led to high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes. A key insight from our testing was the need to simplify the booking process, particularly the checkout flow, which we optimized based on user feedback.

Each round of testing would result in analyzing the results and adjusting, progressively increasing the fidelity as we went along.

The video in this section is an 10 minute example of part of a usability session I conducted, using a prototype I built using HTML/CSS. In it, you can see where finding and booking a room was successful, the checkout process and design made it confusing for the user to complete.

Specs & Deliverables

I collaborated closely with iOS developers, providing detailed wireframes, motion specifications, and user flows to guide development. Our project management approach utilized a visual post-it note system to define features and track progress, ensuring alignment across teams.

View the wireframe

An exploration in providing recommendations to customers, and allowing Hotels to be voted into the Tablet curated hotel list explored during the 'define' phase.

View the spec

Dimensions and spacing for the main hotel card provided for the iOS developers.

Project management

Working directly with two iOS developers I helped manage the development of the first version of the app using a post it note system to define features and track progress.

Results

The Tablet Hotels app achieved a 4.9-star rating on over 3,000 reviews and was featured as the App of the Day on the App Store. This recognition validated our design approach and underscored the impact of our user-centered design process.

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