Smart Neighborhood - Expedia
Overview
Designing Context That Converts — My Role in Expedia’s Smart Neighborhood Initiative
When I first joined the Smart Neighborhood project at Expedia, the mission was clear: travelers needed more than just a property listing — they needed to understand the story of where they’d be staying. I led the design efforts to close that gap, knowing that richer context could be the difference between an abandoned booking and a confirmed trip.
Seeing the Gap
Our existing location content was functional, but it lacked depth. Guests would browse a property, glance at a sparse location section, and leave without booking. Previous attempts to fix it had failed — in some cases, even hurting conversions by cluttering the page with generic lists of nearby spots. One test, which added extra location info at the top of the Property Details Page (PDP), showed inconclusive results.
It was obvious: this wasn’t about adding more data. It was about designing an experience that told a story and helped travelers feel confident about where they were booking.
Digging Into the Data
To get there, I immersed myself in both qualitative and quantitative insights:
PDP Vision Project testing gave me a baseline of how users engaged with location sections in the past.
Recent UX conversion tests, including “What’s around the area,” highlighted what was helping and what was falling flat.
Tableau reporting uncovered where location content wasn’t resonating or was being ignored altogether.
1:1 user interviews brought the numbers to life, showing me the moments when travelers felt connected to — or disconnected from — a property’s surroundings.
Working Within Boundaries
This project had tight guardrails. We couldn’t create net-new components, and we had to work within existing design patterns. On top of that, we were producing over 15 different design solutions, so I had to minimize variables to keep our testing clean and meaningful.
Designing the Approach
I organized our work into three core themes:
Primary Highlights — distilling the top location facts travelers cared about most.
Navigation — helping users explore the surrounding area easily.
Image-Rich Content — using visuals to create a more immersive and emotional connection.
For each theme, I designed 3–5 unique variations, totaling over 15 solutions. Each set went through dedicated user tests, and I intentionally “went wide” to give the PM a backlog of validated ideas for future iterations.
The Result
The Smart Neighborhood initiative became more than just a location section redesign — it was a shift in how Expedia approached neighborhood storytelling.
We elevated PDP’s location experience from static and forgettable to dynamic and context-rich.
We created a repeatable testing and iteration framework that future teams could build on.
And most importantly, we positioned Expedia to set a new standard for how travel platforms present neighborhood context — making it easier for travelers to say “yes” to their next trip.
