My Role
One Man Army
Product Design, Web Design, Full Stack Development, Copywriting
Company
Day FiftyFive LLC
Worked on this project independantly through my consulting agency
Overview
I helped this company establish a digital presence and better cater to their clientele with a flexible online booking application. United Travel LLC is a black car services operating in the tourism sector. They wanted an intuitive way for their clients to book rides in advance online and begin automating that aspect of their business. In addition to this, they also needed a marketing website to attract new clients.
The Problem
Designing a website and product that conveys a sense of luxury and is intuitive and simple to use.
When doing some market research on United Travel’s competitors, I noticed that many of them did not have very intuitive booking systems. It was very common to see either confusing or bloated booking forms. The design language of many of the competitor sites was also extremely dated and inelegant.
In addition to this, it was also important to craft a well designed marketing website. One of the primary goals that the company wanted to achieve with this website was to bring in more new clients.
Objectives
Make the product very easy to access and user for first time users.
Design a product that is powerful and gives the users plenty of details for their ride so that the process can be as worry-free as possible.
Apply a clean and modern design that will help develop trust with new clients.
Technologies Breakdown
Implementing a modern fully JavaScript based stack
In order to build this project, I used a very modern technology stack based entirely on JavaScript. The back end and API of the project is built on Node.JS, Express, and Mongoose. The front end is built using a combination of modern ES6 JavaScript for AJAX navigation, and React is used to power the booking application and admin dashboard.
Automatic light & dark themes. The entire site switches between light and dark themes automatically based on the user’s system theme.
Fully featured user authentication. Users can login using their Google account, Facebook account, or by creating an account with email.
Final Booking App Design
After much experimenting, I settled on a card based design system.
I tried many different layouts for the booking application but ultimately decided to go with a card-based layout. The reason I went with this design was to simplify the flow and make it less confusing. One of the things I noticed about some of the competitor products was that they had very dense forms which required lots of fields to be filled out at once. By using this card layout I was able to simplify the booking flow and make each step more clear.
Using cards makes each step of the process clear. It lets the user focus on one task at a time, making them more likely to enter the correct information the first time around.
Secure Transactions
Secure payments are facilitated using the PayPal SDK and Square Checkout API with all transactions verified on the server.
Google Maps API provides routes and navigation time estimates based on traffic models.
Conclusion & Reflection
This project was extremely enjoyable to work on and a joy to develop.
This project was very fun to work on. Because I was working independently on it, I had full creative control in all aspects of the design. I even had full control over the site’s content as I wasn’t given any content by the company. This allowed me to create, what is in my opinion, a beautiful and functional design that I am very proud of. I learned a lot along the way and credit this project with boosting my skills as a designer to the next level.
The other reason that this project was such a joy was because I had full control over the technology stack used. I used it as an opportunity to create my first larger-scaled Node.js project and got some great experience with the technology. I was also able to introduce myself to several new API’s such as Google Maps, Google oAuth, Facebook Login, PayPal, and Square Payments. What I learned was truly invaluable.
If I could do it Over
I would have gone back and spent just a bit more time with some user interviews. Although I was able to design the product without conducting the interviews, I feel like the interviews would have helped me take the project to the next level.
Key Takeaways
The project took much longer than I had originally planned because it was my first large project and I severely underestimated the amount of work that I would have to put into it.
I had no real experience in copywriting coming into this project so there is a lot of room for improvement there.
I wish I would have had a little more time to spend on the admin interface as it was more rushed compared to the rest of the project.
Like what you see? Let’s work together. Shoot me an email and we can connect.
hello@arjunsamir.com