Time to feel at peace and book your next hotel, full of exclusive destinations with Grace Venture.
Deliverables
UX Design
UI Design
Logo Design
Brand Design
Tools
Adobe XD
Illustrator
Photoshop
Grace Venture is a hotel booking collection agency full of the most pleasurable stays across six continents worldwide. The design aimed to create clean aesthetics and immersive pictures to provide a perfect experience for finding the right hotel.
My Role
As a solo designer and travel enthusiastic on this effort, my responsibilities included competitor analysis with other travel websites, designing the branding & design systems and creating wireframes and UI screens.
My Love for travelling
I have a personal connection with travelling. Why? Travelling has its advantages, and I believe it's a fantastic learning experience for anyone. When you travel, you embark on new adventures, meet new people and see different life aspects. You grow as a person. You will never honestly know what you can do until you challenge yourself to do things you've not done before in a country where people think and see things differently from you.
My Goal
My Goal for this project was to learn the fundamentals of UX/ UI Design and design a project that I would love to build.
The project's objective was to design a solution to improve the user experience on travel websites, so buyers, when searching, can feel relax at their own pace searching for the right hotel destination, all using the art of design.
The problem in travel UX websites.
Design is not just about how neat the application looks. Design is more about how it makes a person feel. When It comes to travels, some tend to misuse the user experience for business goals, which loses the essence of attaining the human experience, resulting in potential consumers leaving the site or being misled into buying something they don't need/want.
Here are three examples:
Overloading with information
Travel websites such as booking.com and lastminutes.com overload their user with excessive information to process, causing a cognitive load, resulting in an overwhelmed user. Even though the landing page is the forefront to push out what the business offers, keeping the landing page simple lets the user focus on the task at hand.
Dark patterns in copywriting
There are a variety of psychological tricks to lure you in to purchase rooms on travel sites, inputting fear in user to act fast or them missing out on exclusive offers. booking.com uses UX copying writing language such as “only X rooms left on the site.”, “Last booked for your dates 2 hours ago on our site.” They use scarcity, a psychological trick to nudge the user to book and purchase with urgency.
Low Quality Imagery
The visitors imagine a place in their heads first, and by the time they sit down to do some searching, they already have an expectation. Travel is a visual experience for humans; you have to translate vision board in their heads and connect them with images, as we humans respond to and press visual data better and faster. A lack of clean, welcoming visual imagery is a negative factor for getting customers to continue past your landing page.
Designing The Solution
Grace Venture went through several iterations as I went by researching and designing simultaneously. Researching made me realise that there were three main types of travel site audiences. The Browser, The Hunter & Buyer. The two primary audiences where the browsers and the Hunters. They were similar as the browser looks for inspiration on the site through high-quality imagery and the Buyer who knows what they want and book it right away.
I designed the website with high-quality widespread imagery, welcoming copywriting and Information on the screen. I went through creating wireframes before adding colour and content to the designs.
Wireframes
I created a list of mid-fidelity screens to cover different scenarios for web applications. Using design systems help me build the wireframes and later go on to make the high fidelity mockups with speed.
White Space Designs
White space designs and reduce information across pages allow users to breathe and focus on one thing at a time. White space designs will enable the user to follow a journey throughout a site, promoting professionalism and trust for the brand. Simple headers, short descriptions, and dividers create a smoother consumer experience on the grace venture design.
Reassuring Language
Responsive Web Design
What I have learnt
My Passion for designing the solution
Grace Venture was my first self taught UI Project, which I developed along the way whilst learning the art of UX/UI Design. I have recognised the growth in my work developing this project using Atomic Design to easily create screens, learning about responsive design from mobile to desktop and typography hierarchy.
Travel Sites have 3 defined audiences
The Browser is usually seeking inspiration by looking through different visual aesthetics sites. The Hunters tend to compare prices looking for the best offer on the market. And the Buyers, who’s knows what they want.
The Importance of design systems
A Design System is a set of deliverables that groups all the elements that will allow the transitional department of teams to understand, design, and develop products. The deliverable I created was the atomic design & style guide, which helps create a consistent experience.