Travel Companion
Two-sided marketplace designed to bring the worlds of leisure and business travel into one tool — Proof of concept / Mobile / Hospitality / Research & development / 0 to 1
Overview & Goals /
Bridging the gap between travel contexts and ensuring seamlessness
As the number 1 hotel chain in the world, the hospitality market was shifting very quickly—people were staying at hotels less and in independently-run accommodations more. From flights to ridesharing to in-room moments, Marriott began to think more holistically about the booking and stay experiences. By creating seamless connections between travel touch points, customers could make use of a single product and service that meets all travel needs.
Individual contribution—
Subsite design system / Expanded design language / Module library / Cross-platform template design
Top / An activity in which participants force ranked elements that influenced their itinerary choices. Middle / A sketch of the potential interactions of business and leisure moments across all phases of the traveler’s journey. Bottom / An individual’s feature preferences within an app map.
User Background /
Considering widely-felt anxiety, uncertainty, and excitement in trip management.
Based on personal experience, general knowledge, as well as research, a few things were immediately clear to us. Traveling evokes anxiety, excitement, and anticipation; it comes with the inconveniences and stresses of being away from home. Some of these pain points are not addressable or solvable by a product, but we could design technology to create more ease, seamlessness, and decrease cognitive load. For the masses of people who do their own travel bookings, this one-stop-shop aimed to serve as an online travel agent to remove the fragmentation of booking.
Top / A broad journey overview with human experience considerations. Bottom / The collaborative dynamic between design and engineering with planned iterations.
Process /
Validating integrations and connections to inform design constraints
The research plan for this project was extensive. It manifested as two parallel research tracks—one qualitative and one more engineering-centric. The former leaned into understanding journey phases across the end-to-end travel experience while the latter focused on validating the feasibility of the product within a proof of architecture stream. Multiple rounds of research included card sorting, preference testing, and task walkthroughs.
Top / High-fidelity concepts focused on a single experience and a curated itinerary. Bottom / High-fidelity concepts focused on a dayparting and news/social feed.
Business & Design Challenges /
Consolidating too many value props into a single experience
Through research, we identified a two-sided marketplace—one side in which people would shop for their bookings and one side that allowed vendors like Uber or Delta to integrate with the experience. Alongside this marketplace, we identified two dimensions of travel—business and leisure. The complexity here can’t be overstated; there are layers of elements to account for. This leads to an app that can be comprehensive, but is likely too robust and inflated. How might we design for the totality of the travel experience without overwhelming our end-user?
A subset of screens tested within a click-through prototype which centered around a dashboard approach.
Solutions & Outcomes /
A more focused experience with a clear value prop to take to market
We designed around different types of trips and explored how people can even combine experiences. Framework explorations stress tested our concept and we explored 4 different ways to anchor our design—single experience, curated itinerary, dayparting, and news feed. Through research, we discovered that all of these felt too limiting and decided on a more dashboard-style approach to test in-market.
Select screens of high-fidelity concept design—home, booking detail, and flight selection.