While we all cope with this global pandemic together, our team wanted to shine a spotlight on the different departments of the WhereTo team to illuminate what makes us so unique. This week we’re starting with the design group, led by James Raj.
Legacy booking tools take a maddening number of clicks to book a trip. To build something 10X better, we gave our designers a high hurdle. With each feature, we ask whether it is intuitive enough that a user could book their entire trip in a few minutes on a cracked screen late at night at a crowded bar (editor’s note: This was before COVID-19). If a user could find the info they want with that level of distraction, it’s good for business travel and moves into development. If it doesn’t, it goes back to the drawing board.
Important company-specific information to drive smarter traveler decisions.
This means less is more - we’ve designed our product in a way that brings all the necessary pieces of information to the top but hides all the supplemental information from plain sight. This enables the traveler to be curious and discover more if they would like to, with hover overs, tooltips, and view more options scattered throughout the site.
Labels and tooltips for the traveler to discover more.
This philosophy allows us to solve for the experienced traveler who knows what they want and wants to accomplish it quickly without all the “extra” and also for the more casual or novice traveler who wants to make sure they research every option before they make a decision.
What’s coming next?
This week, we will debut our redesigned flight results page on both desktop and mobile.
WhereTo’s completely redesigned flight results page
WhereTo’s redesigned flight results page on mobile
Meet James Raj, Head of Product Design
Starting his career at an award-winning industrial design firm focused heavily on hardware design, James brings a user-centered approach to product design at WhereTo. He practices the Psycho-Aesthetics design philosophy. Prior to WhereTo, he worked at 3 high-growth startups in LA that have a total valuation of $250M+ and founded and scaled his own Agile Product Development firm.
