Orbitz - iOS concept

Background

When articles started emerging about the slow death of skeuomorphism and the embrace of more flat simple design styles, we, as designers, didn't take any time to start planning how we would redesign the app to fit into the flat design style.

We knew we had to pitch the idea to the team, our stakeholders, and our product managers, so I feverishly began rethinking the design. Below are some of the explorations and concepts I designed to pitch the idea.

After presenting the ideas to the team and stakeholders, we got the green light. Fortunately for us, we weren't known as a team that took small risks and lengthy time-frames to reach a goal. We met to see the impact this would have on current projects and the effort it would take to push out a redesign, and because we had a rockstar team of developers and designers, we decided to go for it.

Exploration Screenshots

After talking with the team, we all agreed that it would be great for the app to inspire our user to want to travel or begin anticipating an upcoming trip. Taking inspiration from travel brochures, we decide the best way would be on the homepage of the app by providing them with great travel photos of destinations as soon as they open the app.

We met with our photo content team to determine the top 100 destinations our users travel to see if it was possible to obtain photos for each destination to use in the new design. They said it was possible, so we used that to model the apps home screen. If the user enabled the app's location services, it would detect if the user was in a destination with a photo. If they were, we displayed an image of that city or point of interest. If they were shopping for a particular location or purchased a trip, we would show that destination when they opened the app. If we could not determine the area or hadn't shopped or booked a trip, we would display one of 4 default photos that would rotate and change each time the user opened the app.

Outcome

After I presented the screen shots and got approval to redesign the apps, the designers and myself collaborated to bring the last Orbitz (Pre-Expedia acquisition) app to life.