The Challenge
HNext's booking flow had grown organically over several years, feature by feature, without ever being reconsidered as a whole. Agents managing corporate accounts had to move through a long, linear sequence of screens — search, filter, compare, negotiate rates, confirm — with very little support for the kind of back-and-forth decision-making their job actually required.
The result wasn't just a usability problem. New agents took weeks to reach full productivity, support tickets around booking errors were a recurring cost, and the interface had become a real barrier to onboarding the volume of new business the company was trying to grow into.
Before & After
The original results list treated every hotel identically and left agents to do the comparison work themselves — a dense, undifferentiated list where every hotel required the same manual comparison effort.
The redesign surfaces the differences that actually drive a corporate booking decision: fewer, richer cards with negotiated-rate matches ranked first instead of buried on page three.
The Approach
I started by shadowing agents on live calls rather than in a research lab — the constraints of a real booking conversation turned out to matter more than any usability heuristic. From there, the work centered on three moves:
- Reducing the booking journey from seven steps to four
- Surfacing negotiated corporate rates as a first-class signal instead of a hidden filter
- Introducing a persistent comparison tray so agents could hold multiple options in view at once
Every change was scoped against a simple test: does this reduce the number of decisions an agent has to make, or does it just rearrange them? Several early ideas — including a more guided wizard-style flow — were dropped because they optimized for first-time use at the cost of the speed power users relied on every day.
Key design decisions
- Search & filter: Corporate rate matches ranked first in results, not buried behind secondary filters
- Comparison tray: Persistent side panel for holding multiple hotels in view during live client calls
- Confirmation: Streamlined four-step checkout with clear summary rows before commit
- Component foundation: Reusable patterns designed to extend across the wider HNext platform
Outcomes
Post-launch, agent feedback shifted noticeably — the most common support request went from "how do I find the corporate rate" to feature requests for the comparison tray on other parts of the product. New agents reached full productivity in meaningfully less time, and the design system components built for this project became the foundation for the wider HNext platform redesign that followed.
The comparison-tray pattern in particular outlived the original project — it's now used in three other parts of the product where agents need to evaluate multiple options at once.