Hotwire

I was an embedded designer on Hotwire’s Labs team of researchers, helping to lead innovation and service design across product areas.

Overview

Founded in 2000 and now part of the Expedia Group, Hotwire was a 15 year old online travel agency (OTA) that, while still very profitable, had suffered from years of experience and tech debt. When I joined in 2015, the company was in the middle of a culture change and process modernization that put the customer at the heart of the experience.

My ROLE

I was excited to join Hotwire as part of the recently formed Labs Team. As the only designer on a team of researchers, I worked horizontally across all Hotwire product pillars. I helped to bring innovations to life by taking high-level concepts and turning them into testable ideas. Eventually, my role expanded to include a service-design focus, looking across the organization for systemic problems and opportunities.   

IMPACT 

Improved our team’s impact - I conducted an internal service design effort to assess, report, and make recommendations on how the team was functioning in support of our product and design teams. I conducted a series of stakeholder interviews and retros. I arrived at several recommendations to optimize and scale our research practice by building our designer-led research muscles and creating a new partnership-based dynamic vs. service provider. These improvements resulted in more teams leveraging data and insights to guide decision making and a more effective team. 

Lifted conversion - I partnered to help design, test, and ship a modular hotel result card design that worked across platforms, removed unnecessary UI elements and color, had a flexible badging system, and clusters essential information for travelers. This effort was a multi-quarter project that included about a dozen key stakeholders and had a business, partner, and user impact. The final solution resulted in a 6% conversion lift or about 12 million in additional revenue. 

Helped discover new growth opportunities - As part of an innovation workstream supported by our Head of Product, I helped organize and lead workshops that resulted in a backlog of new business opportunities. We prioritized and designed several concepts for experimentation from the output, and the leading idea became a multi-quarter program to test possible subscription service.

TAKEAWAYS

Research pays off  - Being embedded on a team that continually leveraged various methodologies helped me understand how important having qualitative and quantitative data is for a company at scale. While I’d adopted a human-centered design mindset before Hotwire, I’d never been so close to research. I left Hotwire a true believer in the value of investing in research as a function, not just for design but for a company overall. I also became a believer that designers should build the muscles to at least run their usability tests. 

Experimenting at scale drives revenue - and it’s fun! Until joining Hotwire, all of my experience had come from agency work and working with early-stage startups. I never had the kind of crazy traffic to get conclusive results on my work and mostly relied on qualitative tests to validate designs. But Hotwire had an experimentation engine going, and I learned about the practice of experimentation, how best to gather ideas, prioritize them, and build from the learnings. 

Be rigorous - Ideas were pretty cheap at Hotwire and our leadership demanded evidence to support decision making. Diving deep into a user or business problem, doing the requisite investigations, audits, data gathering, and research was necessary to justify roadmaps and backlogs. And once you see teams make decisions with rigor, it’s hard to see any other way. 

Organization design matters - We brought in Peter Merholz to consult on how to improve our product design and product organization. I was fortunate to be part of the working group and to learn how to approach everything from leveling guidelines, to team structures and how to make room for discovery work to drive better outcomes. Many of the organizational playbooks Peter championed and we adopted at Hotwire I’ve carried forward into my more recent stops.