OYO Rooms is a network of over 2000 branded hotel rooms in India. It provides standardized features across all it’s properties such as complimentary breakfast, free wifi etc.
Objectives
In its early stages, all the booking of the hotel rooms used to take place via operatives over the telephone. I was tasked with designing their web interface with a focus on enabling engagement with the website in the form of hotel discovery, search and bookings.
Two of my major objectives were:-
- Create an effective booking flow for hotels, which included search, booking and payment
- To establish a design language which would power the complete web experience
Research and Expectation Mapping
In order to get an understanding of the target market and identify their pain points we spent a couple of weeks at the beginning of the project carrying out some preliminary research, which included direct interaction with customers, soliciting feedback from various teams in the organization, visits to the hotel properties, listening to custom support calls etc.
We then proceeded to create a matrix of the various stages of the consumer buying cycle and plot the pain points, product features, and business requirements at each stage.
User Flow
Armed with the knowledge and insights form the previous exercises, we were able to establish some basic user flows and optimize it for the booking process.
Wireframing
We then proceeded to create a few wireframes which allowed us to identify the critical path we wanted the user to take and then work to shorten it as much as possible. During this phase we also took some key design decisions regarding the layout, placement of various action items etc.
Since this was going to be the first version of the product to support this flow, we did not have much data to work with. Instead we relied on best practices and past experiences of the team.
Final Outcome
