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Skirchi Lodge

Reimagining Mobile Hotel Booking, From the Ground Up

This project was part of a UX Design Institute assignment to design the booking experience for your dream hotel. Now imagine this: a rustic treehouse retreat in Africa, where the first thing you see when you look up from your window is a giraffe staring right back at you. That's the idea that inspired Skirchi Lodge. Rest easy knowing your money goes directly into supporting the on-premises giraffe sanctuary — and while not everyone might love waking up face-to-face with a giraffe, they'll certainly appreciate clear, easy room booking. So before I got carried away with the branding, I conducted research with real users to make booking as straightforward as possible.

Role UX Researcher & Designer

Problem Mobile hotel-booking apps don't withhold information — they bury it, leaving travelers to guess at prices and policies instead of trusting what's on the screen.

Outcome Two usability sessions traced that doubt to information density, not absence — a finding now shaping Skirchi Lodge's mobile booking flow, with design underway.

Timeline May – Sept 2026

Tools Figma, Miro, Zoom

Problem Statement

Mobile Booking Hides the Details Travelers Need to Trust It

Across the mobile booking platforms I tested, the problem was never a missing detail — it was a buried one. Rate tiers, taxes, and cancellation terms were technically on the screen, just never where a traveler was looking for them. When something didn't add up, participants blamed themselves, not the app.

I'm using these findings to ground the booking flow for Skirchi Lodge, a boutique hotel I'm designing around an on-site giraffe sanctuary. Before sketching a single screen, I wanted real evidence for what makes travelers doubt a listing instead of just guessing at it.

The problem wasn't missing information —
it was information that was hard to find and harder to trust.

User Research and Analysis

Density Was the Real Villain, Not Missing Information

I ran two moderated usability sessions with mobile-first travelers, each comparing two platforms head-to-head on the same task — search, evaluate, and book a room — across Booking.com, Hilton, and Expedia. Full session notes and affinity clustering live on the research board below — each participant’s raw sticky notes, organized by task, before anything got clustered into themes.

Miro board showing raw sticky notes from three usability test participants, organized in columns by task

2 usability sessions moderated, mobile-only, Booking.com vs. Hilton vs. Expedia

We got 300 clubs onto the platform within one semester.

User said:

"I get overwhelmed easy and don't have a crazy amount of time to spend hours and hours trying to figure this out."

User said:

"I don't like to be surprised." — toggled on "show taxes and fees" before reviewing a single rate.

Buried in Plain Sight

Both sessions surfaced the same paradox: platforms handed over more information than anyone needed while burying the one thing they were actually looking for. One participant missed a hotel’s distance to the nearest Tube station entirely on her first pass — not because it was missing, but, in her words, because “there was so much other information, and it just wasn’t highlighted well.”

That density has a real cost on mobile. As one participant put it: “If I were doing my usual booking — it’s evening, I’m on the couch, I’m excited to travel — I would hop on and then exit expeditiously because the amount of information would irritate me.”

Pricing That Creates Doubt, Not Clarity

Rate tiers, taxes, and eligibility requirements were present but never explained, so participants had to infer what a price difference meant instead of being told outright. When they guessed wrong, they blamed themselves, not the interface — arguably worse than an obvious error, since it erodes confidence without ever surfacing as a bug.

These two patterns — density that hides the right detail, and pricing that reads like a guess — are what I’m designing against next, as I start sketching Skirchi Lodge’s own booking flow.

Helping Students Find Their Fit During a Pandemic

Co-founded with two college friends, Campus set out to fix how students discovered clubs and community, a problem COVID made urgent overnight. I led research and design and built roughly half the frontend, eventually winning a competitive bid to run the university's official virtual club fair.

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