300K
Users reached in validation research
20%
Traffic in A/B test before full adoption
5
Design principles co-defined across teams
2
Age groups tested, full acceptance in both
I was part of the core team leading Hurb's visual language overhaul, a cross-functional initiative across product design, marketing, branding, research, and engineering. I co-facilitated the design principles workshop, led the audit of existing product surfaces, and owned the application of new fundamentals to product screens and components.
Hurb is a travel marketplace expanding internationally. In 2018, product and marketing had drifted into separate visual languages while the design system was still being built. Building a component library on top of that inconsistency would have locked it in. The project was to go back to first principles before anything else got built.
Visual inconsistency as a trust problem
Product and marketing were working from different visual rules. The gaps showed up across the platform: brand applied inconsistently, experiences that felt disjointed depending on where you were in the flow, usability problems that traced back to no shared foundation. Building a component library on top of that would have locked in the inconsistency. The fix had to start upstream.
Seven methods across qualitative and quantitative research
We ran a 4-stage workshop with both product and marketing designers to agree on 5 shared principles. From there, the new visual direction was validated at scale: a first impression test across 300K users split into two age groups, card sorting with the same profiles, and an A/B test on 20% of traffic across the two highest-revenue regions, tracking revenue, session value, abandonment rate, and product page engagement.
Phase 01
Principles
4-stage workshop with the full design team — brand ideation (do/don't), naming, and Maslow prioritisation dynamics.
Phase 02
Audit
Review of all purchase flow screens, ad pieces, and banners — analysing colour, type, spacing, photography, and tone of voice against the new principles.
Phase 03
Inspiration
Moodboard exercise bringing in references from outside travel — fintechs, marketplaces, real estate — to avoid converging on category defaults.
Phase 04
Co-creation
Hands-on homepage redesign exercise applying the principles — exploring new directions, identifying visual patterns that emerge naturally.
Phase 05
Validation
Online survey (300K users), card sorting, and A/B test via Optimizely against the top 2 revenue regions at 20% traffic exposure.
Phase 06
Delivery
Each designer applies the new fundamentals to their team's screens. Design system reorganised for flexibility and universality.
Principle alignment
"Objective", "Simple", and "Clean" rank top 3 across both age groups, directly mapping to principles defined at the workshop. The visual direction and the team's intentions were aligned.
Trust signal
Cleaner interfaces read as more trustworthy — which mattered for a brand handling high-value travel purchases where purchase anxiety runs high.
Older audience
The more contemporary approach was well accepted by older users, a key concern for Hurb's existing customer base. Contemporary doesn't mean inaccessible.
Photo-led layouts outperform
Photo-led layouts show stronger engagement for key user profiles over illustration-led ones, directly shaping the primary visual direction of the new language.
FOMO mechanics generate anxiety
Countdown timers and urgency mechanics are perceived as misleading — a finding that goes beyond aesthetics and informs content and conversion strategy.
A/B test result: satisfactory
No regression in key business metrics, with positive movement in session value and abandonment rate, justifying full adoption of the new visual language.
01 — Principles before pixels, built cross-team, not top-down.
The principles were defined with both product and marketing designers, using Maslow's hierarchy to prioritise. A shared language only works if the people who have to use it had a hand in shaping it.
02 — Look outside the travel category for inspiration.
The moodboard exercise deliberately excluded travel competitors, pulling references from fintechs, marketplaces, and real estate to avoid designing toward the travel industry's visual clichés.
03 — Validate aesthetics like product decisions.
First impression test, card sorting, A/B test. Aesthetic choices earned the same evidence standard as UX decisions, rather than being settled by internal preference.
04 — Photo-led hierarchy over illustration.
A research finding, not an aesthetic opinion: photo-led layouts show stronger engagement for key user profiles, shaping the primary visual direction of the new language.
05 — Distribute the first delivery across the team.
Each designer applies new fundamentals to their own product area and documents new components along the way. Speed without losing ownership.
300K
Users reached in validation research
20%
Traffic in A/B test before full adoption
5
Design principles co-defined across teams
2
Age groups tested, full acceptance in both
"A travel brand going global can't afford to look like it was built by two separate teams who never talk to each other. Visual inconsistency is a trust problem."