A complete, research-driven UX design project — from usability testing on live hotel websites through affinity mapping, journey mapping, hand-drawn wireframes, and high-fidelity prototype.
Hotels · London
Hotel booking flows are often opaque, frustrating to navigate, and designed in ways that erode user trust. This project asked: what does it look like when every design decision is grounded in what real users actually need?
Hotel booking flows are confusing, hide critical information like cancellation policies, and fail to support users in making confident decisions.
Design a booking experience that is transparent, well-structured, and gives users the confidence to complete their booking without second-guessing.
A fully interactive Figma prototype with 15+ documented screen states, built on evidence from usability testing, affinity mapping, and journey mapping.
Before sketching a single screen, I ran usability testing sessions on two real hotel booking websites — Barceló and The Doyle Collection — observing where users struggled, where they felt confident, and what broke their trust.
Users couldn't assess hotel proximity to landmarks. Without a map, they doubted their own knowledge of the city's geography and hesitated to commit.
Across all four usability tests, breakfast was consistently impossible to find. Users forgot it was a task requirement because it simply wasn't visible where expected.
Free cancellation only appeared after clicking 'Book Now' — creating anxiety and eroding the trust users needed to proceed with a purchase.
Room types were presented as large photos with no labelling, filtering, or comparison data. Users were forced to scroll repeatedly with no way to narrow their options.
Users felt immediately oriented when the homepage navigation was self-explanatory. A clear layout reduced cognitive load and built initial confidence.
When the primary booking action was in the top-right corner, users found it immediately — it matched their mental model from TripAdvisor and Booking.com.
I'd like a little map to pop up there — I am a visual person. So you can see how far you are away from anywhere.
Usability Test Participant · Barceló
I built an affinity diagram in Miro by analysing 14 pages of timestamped notes from four usability sessions. Observations were grouped into nine recurring problem themes that drove every subsequent design decision.
Users needed visual mapping tools to feel confident about hotel locations and proximity to city landmarks.
Filters were invisible or missed entirely. Poor visual hierarchy forced excessive scrolling without results.
Pricing, policies, and room details needed to be visible upfront — not discovered deep in the booking funnel.
Rooms were image-heavy and data-light, making comparison impossible without significant effort from the user.
Free cancellation was duplicated, unclear, or hidden — one of the most critical signals for user trust and booking confidence.
Pay-on-arrival options were not surfaced early enough. Total price including fees needed to be visible at every stage.
The design process followed a rigorous, sequential path — each phase building on the last, with no step skipped.
Observed real users booking hotels on Barceló and The Doyle Collection. Timestamped note-taking across 4 sessions.
Synthesised 14 pages of notes into 9 themed clusters in Miro, identifying recurring patterns across participants.
Mapped emotions, pain points, and goals across 7 journey stages with an emotion graph showing dips in user confidence.
Hand-drew 20+ screen states on paper, iterating on key components across multiple versions before moving to Figma.
Built a high-fidelity, fully interactive Figma prototype with 15+ documented states covering the complete booking flow.
The prototype documents the full booking journey — from homepage search through to checkout — with every interaction state labelled and justified.
Hero search with destination, dates, and guests. Curated room sections below the fold with real-time availability indicators.
Persistent map preview, active filter tags, sort controls, and list/map view toggle.
Interactive map with hotel pins and popup previews — designed directly from research.
Cancellation policy on room cards. Photo gallery, room table with price, options, and CTA.
Live price updates as upgrades are selected. Persistent accommodation summary throughout.
This project taught me that the most impactful design decisions are often the simplest ones — surfacing a price, labelling a filter, showing a map. The research made it clear that users were not confused because they lacked intelligence; they were confused because the information they needed was hidden or ambiguous.
The process of moving from timestamped usability notes to an affinity diagram to a journey map to sketches to a prototype also demonstrated why skipping any of these steps is costly. Each phase revealed something the previous one could not: the notes captured moments, the affinity diagram revealed patterns, the journey map showed emotions, and the sketches tested structure before a single pixel was committed to Figma.
If I were to extend this project, I would conduct usability testing on the prototype itself — closing the loop by comparing the original pain points against the new design — and iterate on the post-booking screens, which remain outside the scope of this version.