[Design nuances] Improved hotel search results

This is the first in a new theme we’re starting on the Cleartrip Blog called Design Nuances. Design Nuance posts will focus on explaining why a certain aspect of the Cleartrip user interface was designed to look and work the way it does.

Yesterday we pushed an update to our hotel search results that made enhancements to the design of the hotel search results. Before this update was released, our hotel search results looked like this:

As you can see, the above design shows a price for the hotel, but it’s not immediately clear whether that price is the total price or a per room price. This confusion made it clear that the existing design didn’t fit with one of Cleartrip’s core principles–be transparent.

With that in mind, we picked up our pencils and began work on redesigning it. We had two goals for the redesign:

1. Make it easy for people searching to see the total cost of the hotel stay and the average cost of the hotel room per night
2. Reduce the length of the results page–as we go about increasing the number of hotels available in our search, the result page was getting too long–some cities return over 150 hotels

The redesigned hotel results met both goals–we now show only 15 hotels per page and added links to more hotels in the results to the top and bottom of the page; and we added a slightly greyed out total price next to the per room price to let people see the total and per night prices at a glance.

In design, little things can make a big difference. From now on, we’ll be sharing and posting more examples and explanations of design at Cleartrip the thinking that goes into it.