[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:
- 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
- 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.
Hrush
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http://www.lulu.com/browse/preview.php?fCID=877467
was wondering if you could elaborate on how you judge something should be redesigned? inhouse reviews, user testing, client feedback or a combination of all 3?
p.s. pls bring back the browser stats :)
- Customer feedback
- In house reviews of the product
- Gut feel of the design team
Customer feedback takes top priority.
Regards
Kartik
Your interface is extremely simple & clean and I love that! Great job.
I am not a design or a usability person but I thought I would leave my thoughts here. On the search listings - I think with the new design you can effectively cut down the two lines below which continue to state Average, Total, Book room button. In my opinion, that would take away redundant data, make it more clear and at the same time user can just roll their eyes only on the right hand side if they want to compare prices.
Very often, hotels have more than one room type available and in those cases it's better to leave the Average and Total labels in the display.
1. You are showing the cheapest room rate as the main display on all results.And then you are repeating the same rate when i click on more rates links. And then i may click on a rate which is not shown as the main display. So there is repetition and the way they look makes it confusing enough not to understand if the main display is what i have selected or is something selected by default. I'm not clear
2. In the main display you show the total rate first and the average rate second. But the other rates list shows the average rate first and the total rate second.
3. As a user i'm more interested in the total rate so i would like to see the total amount as the dark one on the right site. To explain the total amount you can show the average rate on the left site adjacent greyed out.
4. In the main area you called the per night rate "per room per night" and in the list its called "average rate"
5. I really like the way you show the total airline fares big and changing as and when i select the flights. That effect is not happening here.
In the hotel detail page you have the per room per night rates as the main display which doesnt seem to be right when you show my check in and check out dates just below that
* The main display and the room/rates list are now consistent, both show the average rate first and the total rate second
* The total price is now the dark one on the right side and the per night rate is shown in lighter text
I think you still missed out the hotel detail page issue. Let me explain
When i'm looking at the golden palm hotel detail page
It says
Golden Palms Hotel & Spa Rs. 10,689 – Rs. 27,207 (shows average rates)
And the next line shows
Check in Friday, 28 March, 2008 Check out Sunday, 6 April, 2008 Guests 1 Adult Rooms 1
This is confusing right? When you show the dates and rooms you should have ideally shown me the total rates.
Otherwise you should have moved the dates and rooms line to the room rates section.
Do i make sense? What you say?