Competitive benchmarking
Compared established hotel-booking journeys to understand familiar patterns, gaps and opportunities across search, results, rooms and payment.
04 / Case study
Designing a clearer hotel booking journey.
An evidence-led desktop experience shaped from competitive research and usability observation through journey mapping, interaction design and an interactive prototype.
01 / The brief
Reduce uncertainty across a high-consideration journey.
Booking a hotel asks users to compare location, price, reviews, facilities, room types, policies and extras before committing. The brief was not to decorate another travel website; it was to understand where confidence broke down and create a desktop journey that kept the right information visible at the right time.
02 / Research and synthesis
Evidence before interface.
The project moved from observation to synthesis before any final UI decisions were made. Each stage narrowed a broad booking problem into a set of traceable design priorities.
Usability observation
Recorded structured notes from two usability sessions, separating what participants said from what their behaviour revealed.
Affinity mapping
Grouped individual observations into recurring themes so design priorities were based on patterns rather than isolated comments.
Journey mapping
Mapped goals, actions, positive signals and friction from initial planning through hotel selection, room customisation and payment.
From observations to themes.
Individual observations were clustered, duplicates removed and related signals grouped until recurring themes became visible.
Document the moment friction appears.
Sessions were captured as timestamped observation notes linking user actions, interface states and positive or negative interactions. Participant identity has been omitted.
03 / Customer journey
The emotional low point appeared before the booking did.
Confidence fell sharply while viewing results and room details. Those stages carried the heaviest comparison burden, so they became the centre of the design response rather than treating checkout as the only conversion problem.
04 / Findings
Four problems worth designing around.
Choice lacked orientation
Participants valued filters and maps, but sparse listings and hard-to-find location information made comparison slower than it needed to be.
Decision details arrived late
Breakfast, cancellation terms, room amenities and pay-on-arrival options were often difficult to locate at the moment they mattered.
Comparison relied on memory
Price, reviews, facilities and room information were distributed across the journey, forcing users to remember details between screens.
Customisation became a list
Long add-on choices and unclear bed options increased cognitive load near the end of an already demanding booking journey.
05 / Task flow
Make the whole journey visible before polishing a screen.
The desktop flow defined the main path and its recovery routes: entering trip criteria, refining results, evaluating a hotel, selecting a room and rate, adding extras, paying and confirming. This became the structural contract for the prototype.
06 / Interaction design
Turn findings into behaviour, not decoration.
Search criteria remain visible, filters and map context work together, result cards carry the essentials for comparison and a staged booking model keeps progress and cost understandable as the user moves toward payment.
- 01
Keep the trip in context
Location, dates and guests remain available for review and editing.
- 02
Support comparison
Filters, price, reviews, imagery and map access sit together on the results page.
- 03
Reveal detail progressively
Hotel, room, rate and extras are separated into focused decisions.
- 04
Close the confidence gap
A visible booking sequence, itemised cost and final confirmation make the commitment explicit.
07 / Interactive prototype
From search intent to a confirmed stay.
The final Figma prototype contains fourteen exported states and interactive component variants for search, dates, guests, filters, map views, hotel detail, room choice, add-ons and payment.
08 / Outcome
A complete, traceable UX process.
This was an academic qualification project rather than a publicly launched commercial product. Its value is the evidence chain: raw observation became synthesised findings, findings became a journey and flow, and those structures became annotated designs and a working desktop prototype.
- Competitive benchmark and structured usability evidence
- Affinity diagram and customer journey map
- End-to-end desktop task flow
- Sketches, annotated wireframes and fourteen prototype states
- Developer-oriented annotations and handover assets