Interactive stories on a map for the travel industry.
ROLE
UX / UI Designer
YEAR
2017-2020
COUNTRY
USA and Peru
OVERVIEW
instead of approaching the front desk and ask “what’s a good place to have diner around here?”, Arrivedo gave hotels their own voice through curated guides joined by interactive maps to create an end-to-end dynamic experience for the traveler. Later on, Arrivedo turned out to be a great solution for tourism boards and DMOs as well.
PROBLEM
Hotels had no way to create their own curated content and easily publish on their digital channels.
GOAL
To provide guests with a more complete, technology-driven approach during their stay through reliable recommendations on an interactive map.
SCOPE AND CONSTRAINTS
Travelers might not have an active internet connection all the time.
My Contribution
I joined the Arrivedo team in the middle of 2017 as a Junior UX/UI designer under the wing of Rodrigo Lopez, a Peruvian-born, Silicon Valley-based designer with over 20+ years of experience in tech, I was mostly responsible for taking care of the visual part during the first months, but I eventually expanded to UX solutions, research, iterations and user flows.
I negotiated time, resources and assets to meet roadmap deadlines, redesigned complete flows and was in charge of constantly visually improving the product, while always tending to new requirements from business side.
Although limited from a small startup perspective, I always advocated for the user first and foremost.
Design outcomes (2017 - 2020)
Home page evolution
From 2017 to 2020, our home page was constantly evolving as the business team kept exploring different approaches. The last version, and the one I’m most proud of is the the one you see next to this block of text, which was focused on travel players, not just hotels.
Home pages through the years:
CMS
Arrivedo had a Content Management System for writers to easily create, edit and publish content all in one place. They could tag all mentioned places in the neighborhood guides and the map would automatically connect and display them.
For the articles, we only iterated on top of the existing foundation of the product, mostly because of time costs on the engineering side. This didn’t stop me from advocating for a clean interface that was more appealing for writers to use and enjoy their creating process that much more.
Hotel Metasearch
When I first joined the team, Arrivedo was mostly focused on their hotel metasearch feature. Results showed those that had neighborhood guides first, and they were able to compare prices from different providers, too.
Claim your hotel
Hotels were able to find their hotel in our database and claim it to start working with us. This was one of the final designs for when we were trying this approach, around 2018.
Hotel Admin
When the Business Team decided to put their efforts into White Label solutions for hotels, us in Product dabbled into building a friendly, easy to use Admin dashboard for customers that acquired this tool.
Business landing pages
As I just mentioned above, we worked closely with Business to also tend to their requirements (aside from core product features agreed upon during our yearly roadmap meetings) such as the creation of landing pages and other tasks, These were usually aimed at B2B approaches.
Arrivedo for developers
Having been a tech-driven company and product, and as business model expanded to the travel industry in general and not just hotels, our devs built some integration tools for our customers to build with.
We designed a page for other developers to start working with our code.
“Next” steps
AI Exploration
We were aiming to explore AI for content creation, and introduce features like predictive words and even automated articles. This was a conceptual UI that I designed:
Arrivedo mobile app
We were also hovering on the idea of developing an app, that would help travelers make the most out of their trips.
Unfortunately, with COVID hurting the travel industry so harshly, Arrivedo had to be laid to rest in 2020, after 4 years of growth and success.
I learned so much from working with a multicultural team (🇺🇸 🇵🇪 🇨🇦 🇨🇴 🇲🇽) filled with incredibly talented, kind, hardworking people and I will forever be grateful to have been part of this start up that changed my life in so many ways. ❤️
Have a work inquiry or want to go grab a coffee? Drop me a line at
dianatormel@gmail.com ☕️
Thank you for reading! ✨
