I designed how travelers pick a hotel and pay

A traveler compares hotels on a card, decides on the property page, then pays in checkout. Each of those steps belonged to a different team. I walked the whole path on every platform and looked for the spots where travelers hesitated.

For the traveler it’s one decision, so it had to feel like one product, with the same patterns from the first card to the last tap. That gave me two jobs. Lodging needed one source of truth, so every lodging designer started from the real product. And checkout had to get better in place, step by step, so the business saw gains every quarter.

I designed the lodging card travelers scan in search results, and the property page they land on when they tap one. On the dateless property page, the version travelers see before they’ve picked dates, a test I worked on won with a +1.75% conversion lift.

With a fellow designer I built Source Views, a Figma library that mirrors what’s live in production. Open a new lodging file and you start from the screens travelers see today, not from zero. 500+ designers start there now. Once it worked for lodging, I used what we learned to bring the ads Source Views up to the same standard. The catch with a library like that: it’s only useful while it matches production, so it has to keep pace with every release.

The business needed checkout gains every quarter, and a full rewrite would have paused them. So new checkout pages went live next to the legacy ones, and for a while two generations of pages had to look and behave like one. I contributed to that hybrid with 2 designers, a UX writer, a researcher, 2 PMs and 5+ engineers, and I finished the checkout design system that held it together. I also designed the checkout flow itself, including the travel insurance add-on.

In one quarter I finished four to five checkout projects. One of them, a points payment popover for lodging, won its test. Checkout optimization brought in $5M in revenue and beat the quarterly BPS targets two quarters in a row.

The add-on is a plain choice at the moment you pay: protect the trip, or skip it. The screenshot shows how it looks in Expedia checkout today.

I was a major contributor to the Expedia homepage redesign, and it shipped. With PMs and engineers I also re-architected landing pages across every line of business, one round at a time, aiming at engagement, click-through and conversion. Expedia has since moved on to a newer homepage, so the capture below comes from the Wayback Machine.

Looking back, I’d push for one booking scorecard shared by all three teams from day one. Each team measured its own step, so nobody could see whether a gain on the card cost something in checkout. To travelers the path already felt like one product. The numbers should have too.