I was lucky to join at the right moment when the design team was still in the early stage of exploring homepage redesign. I joined as a principle lead managing the team responsible for the homepage and landing pages in August 2012. At that time the design team were A/B testing a few different homepage concepts. One of the main challenges we faced was convincing the leadership that we had to change the homepage. Since it had not been significantly changed for years and people don’t like big changes, every time we tried something drastic, it affected the bottom line. It took awhile, but my team came up with a concept that got the company excited.

After a long process of negotiation, we decided that we would go ahead and completely redesign the homepage and launch it in beta mode. We wanted to let people opt-in instead of force them into the new design. That way we could get enough traffic to test what’s working without affecting the bottom line too much. We got buyoff from the leadership team and we started the planning process.

Note: To opt-in, go to expedia.com and click on the Show Me button below the header. Make sure you leave some feedback.

It took us awhile to revamp the search wizard, since it is the most important piece of functionality on the page. After a lot of user lab studies and A/B tests, we came up with a model that worked. I am particularly proud of the ability for users to organically build packages from any line of business. For example, you can start out booking a flight and add a hotel and a car to your search. It felt really intuitive.

Another thing that I love about the search form is that it works on desktop and tablets. The reason we didn’t make it work for mobile was that the mobile platform is owned by a separate organization within Expedia. But technically it is not out of reach.

The main story behind the new design is around the idea that travel is supposed to be personal, fun and easy. So we wanted to make sure that the new design conveyed that. We simplified the form and made it much more accessible on touch devices. We used a huge hero image that we hoped would get users into the right mood. We made sure that we remembered you when you come back. Although not all of the ideas have been implemented, it does show where we want to go. I feel like the company is going in the right direction and it has the right kind of people to be successful.

Some of you may wonder why I left if things were going well. I was approached by a late stage startup that promised to let me revamp the product from scratch. It is something that I have always wanted to do, so I went for it. I am very glad though that I had a chance to leave my mark at Expedia and can now finally see it go live.

Desktop version

Tablet version

A few words about the index:

Number-crunchers at IBM Research surveyed 8,192 motorists in 20 cities, and — no surprise — most of them think traffic has only grown worse during the past three years. More than half said gridlock has wreaked havoc on their physical or mental health. One-third said it is undercutting their productivity at work or school…

…IBM used the results to compile a “Commuter Pain Index,” which ranks the emotional and economic toll of commuting. The index is a measure of 10 criteria, from the amount of time spent sitting in traffic to the frequency with which people simply gave up and went home.

via Wired

This is my last project from school. In fall 2006, I spent 10 days with a group of fellow journalism students in Arequipa, Peru producing multimedia stories. Each of us covered an aspect of the city. I chose to cover the city’s architecture. We used all kinds of media such as photo, video, audio and graphics in this project. The project was sponsored by Sister Cities International.

I spent a lot of time on this project. It still is the most ambitious 3D project that I have ever worked on. I started with an idea of creating a 3D virtual tour of the famous Santa Catalina Monastery. Later on, I decided to do the main plaza (Plaza de armas) as well as a bird view map of the whole downtown area.

Since I didn’t have enough references to create a realistic model, I ended up spending a lot of time taking pictures and drawing hand maps of the monastery. In the end, I managed to put all the hundreds of doors and windows in the correct place (or in my dream I did ).

On the down side, there is a couple of annoying bugs we never fixed.

Click here to view the graphics

Awards and honors
2007 – One of Times magazine’s 50 best Web sites of 2007

The rest of the trip was great, though. I had a great time with my friends and drank enough, but not to much, alcohol. My whole body hurts badly now because I danced too much

I will resume the work on this site tomorrow as there are many things left to be done.

I am going to North Carolina to visit some friends and to party with them this weekend. I hope I will be sober enough to resume my work on this site when I am back on Monday.