Lead Product Designer on the Left Travel

Left Travel is a company, owned by Left Technologies Inc, that creates and manages 14 meta-travel accommodation websites. A couple of their top performing websites are RentByOwner.com and Stays.io. Left Travel partners with Airbnb, HomeAway/VRBO and Booking.com, listing all of their properties worldwide.

I was the lead Product Designer on the Left Travel team. I worked directly with a Product Manager, Conversion Rate Optimizer and a team of Bangladeshi developers to make UI improvements, create new features, landing pages and perform A/B tests for the top Left Travel sites. I also underwent a large project to streamline and create a Brand Guideline for the 14 websites.

Tools used for design:

• Sketch
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe XD

Tools used for collaboration and hand-off:

• JIRA
• InVision
• Zeplin
• Slack
• Zoom (for weekly calls with our Bangladesh team)

How we worked:

• Daily, morning scrums with our team in Maple Ridge, BC at 10:15am
• Communication via Slack both in-office and remotely
• Two-week sprints
  • Design sprints aimed to be ~2 sprints (4 weeks) ahead of development sprints, and had its own JIRA board
• Weekly calls via Zoom with the Bangladesh team

Here are some examples of my Left Travel UX projects

Statistically significant A/B test for Details Page

We used SiteSpect for A/B Testing. Working closely with my product manager, we worked in two week sprints to define and build out plans for A/B testing my designs with real audiences.

A good example of a successful A/B test that I designed was a “Details Page” redesign, which is the page for a property listing that shows all of the details such as description, images, amenities, and location.

I made some intentional changes to the new Details Page to improve and clean up the UI, add and organize content.

A/B testing for listings page layouts

Traditionally, Left Travel has a listings/map hybrid layout, just like Airbnb and VRBO. Our competitors, such as Agoda and Kayak, have different listings layouts than other accommodation booking sites like Airbnb and VRBO. My Product Manager wanted to experiment with a “1-up” layout that would be unique to Left Travel, with our iconography, API content and amenities.

UI improvements & additions

Iconography

I designed a new set of icons, to be used consistently across all sites. The icon set are reflective of the needs in the travel and accommodation industry, such as search, favourite & filters, bathrooms, bedrooms, and top amenities. They are similar in style: dark grey, outlines with no fills, and the thickness of the outline varies depending on the usage.

Modernized UI design elements

The original Left Travel websites, such as RentByOwner, were launched in about 2012 and the UI hadn’t been updated since then. I wanted to modernize and clean up UI elements to create better interactive pieces, such as listing cards, search & date picker fields, filters, and map interactions.

BEFORE

AFTER