SIMPLENIGHT

SIMPLENIGHT is a travel-tech startup with two web applications. Its travel e-commerce platform targets young, tech-savvy customers, and its inventory management platform targets travel suppliers, such as tour operators.

Role Senior UI Designer · UX Writer

Partners Chief Technical Officer · Front-end Engineering · Tech Writer · UX Design

Deliverables Wireframes · Design System · High-fidelity

Tools Illustrator · Photoshop

Timeframe 1 year

Agency In-house

The Problem

Travelers don’t have a centralized way to book entertainment and other accommodations. Planning a trip is stressful and overwhelming for travelers who have to book transportation, dining, lodging, dining, and other experiences on different platforms. At the same time, travel suppliers, such as tour operators, have to rely on manual or expensive inventory management systems that only provide a small buyer’s market.

"How do we simplify travel e-commerce and inventory management for travelers and suppliers?"
Success Measurements
  • Increase active supplier users and travel inventory.
  • Reduce the amount of time it takes to book a travel experience.
  • Increase the number of travel consumers.

Process

Discovery

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Define

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Ideate

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Branding

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UX Design

The race to complete an MVP with a dev-first approach required integrations across multiple channels, such as dining, tours, and hotels. A competitor landscape provided cues for expected interactions with travel platforms. I improved dev solutions by wireframing for optimization, flows, and information architecture. View more wireframes >

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Visual Design

Using Bootstrap’s component library and other best practices for user interactions, I took a mobile-first approach and utilized a design language influenced by Google Material Design to support our business objective to design cutting-edge and intuitive platforms. View the full design system >

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Testing

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Results

The travel inventory management platform (requiring  300+ designed screens) and the booking platform (requiring 100+ designed screens) launched and now await widespread market release.
Landrover’s incubation branch recently acquired SIMPLENIGHT.

Lessons Learned
  • Though a UX team onboarded later, a dev-first approach caused a lot of friction, rework, and guesswork. SIMPLENIGHT would have benefited from a customer-first approach that solved human problems, rather than the dreams most start-ups are made of.
  • Start building what yields the highest return of investment.We needed UX research to ensure SIMPLENIGHT’s success, particularly around discovering user habits, motivators, and needs.
  • Taking a dev-first approach caused a lot of rework and little time for design exploration.
  • Features with the highest revenue-generating potential should have been prioritized. For example, we spent many months on the dining vertical, which was simply a non-revenue-generating reservation system.