Online travel agency Expedia.com today unveiled a fresh homepage design for its US website.
The Expedia homepage redesign features a "fully responsive design" -- meaning it works better on tablets and smartphones, and validates the streamlined look pioneered by mobile-first companies like Hotel Tonight and Hipmunk.
Regular users may notice that the booking wizard is now front and center -- moved from its former left-hand corner position -- and now pops up in "just over one second," rather than the previous "more than 2 seconds".
Since a year ago, the company has been testing possible redesigns with selected users. Splashy colorful images now appear behind the search fields for all US users.
The makeover is touted as the most "major" revamp since 2002. Perhaps it means that this has been the biggest increase in speed performance in more than a decade: the company claims the homepage loads "nearly twice as fast as before."
But strictly in terms of its look, the Expedia homepage has gone through multiple, frequent reincarnations, as you can see with the screenshots below:
The project's completion is a milestone for the checkout, data strategy, analytics platforms, and user experience experts on the brand's product team.
It's biggest push was to allow users to search flights and hotels immediately. Internal research released last January claims that users do an average of 48 queries across the Internet before booking a flight.
A global roll out of the design is set to appear later this year.