Priceline - Hotel Extranet
Priceline’s business is built on providing the best deals for their customers. To entice and compel hoteliers to provide Priceline with the best deals, they partnered with Colangelo to deliver a best-in-class experience on their Deals Extranet portal. Our team was extremely lean and consisted of a PM, Account and Strategy person, a Creative Director, and myself. My role was typically on-site with the client 2 days per week, partnering directly with key stakeholders to develop the new platform.
Process
The plan was not to modify the existing functional framework, but rather to improve the experience, and ensure that users could comprehend the complexity of setting and maintaining deals. Internal subject matter experts were consulted at various milestones, and user studies were performed to validate and improve the experiences.
The existing extranet tool...
The existing interface was developed in Microsoft Sharepoint and was the result of an accumulation of functionality over years. The UI was limited to the Sharepoint UI kit, and standard HTML controls. Additionally, the workflow was convoluted and didn’t apply any usability best practices.
High-level user flows
The deal creation aspect covered 5 user flows, which we evaluated, benchmarked, redesigned, and tested.
Iterative design process
The deal creation experience is an incredibly complex one that allows a hotelier to create dynamic deals for multiple room types across many different days with a combination of parameters. We explored a number of options on how to make this both comprehensive and simple for the breadth of user types.
Approach 1. - Multiple steps with clear guidance on top, and the ability for user to choose the type of deal they were creating at the outset. Though simple, the hotelier would need to perform this same task for each deal type multiple times in order to be considered competitive; the approach was too slow for large hoteliers with complex deal offerings.
Approach 1.5 - Similar to approach 1, the revised approach 1.5 also was a multi-step design that gave the user the ability for user to choose the type of deal they were creating at the outset. The revision provided clearer feedback, including a persisting calculator type experience to provide a example of the deal price based on the user's settings.
Final - The approved approach was a single scrolling page with cards for each section and a persistent right bar for guidance and calulations. In testing this helped give users the perception that they were always working on the same thing, and going forward didn't feel like a large commitment.
“The initial reactions from our customers has been immense, they can’t wait to build deals!”
