Kayak: Lessons learned as it relaunches on the iPad

December 22, 2011 | Online Travel

A major lesson learned is the implementation of direct booking of hotels. There’s a big impediment to being a an aggregator of travel deals when you’re working with mobile users: When you direct those customers to outside airline or hotel websites, you never know what exactly you’re sending them into.

The designers in Kayak’s mobile development lab in Concord, Mass. spent a lot of time “nitpicking” and making the design language universal for the brand, said Bill O’Donnell, Kayak’s GM of mobile and chief architect.

“With this new release, we wanted to bring it up to modern iPad app standards and our own modern visual look we have in our iOS applications,” he said in an interview Tuesday. And making the way the app is navigated and making all the functions consistent (the UIs for flight and hotel search were different in the previous app) was a huge priority.

“It’s more consistent than before,” O’Donnell said. “Before, three different pieces of the app were developed by different people at different times.”

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