matthew.d.mercer, visual thinker

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When people go shopping for travel online, the first thing they're asked is where they want to go, followed by when they want to travel. What about those who want to go, but don't know where and might not even know when? Orbitz produced MyIdealBeach.com as an opportunity to help travelers interested in a beach vacation find a trip that meets their personal interests and preferences. Because the target audience is someone who might be considering a vacation and doesn't know where (or even whether) he/she wants to go, this site is highly tonal; it focuses less on the more statistics-loading look and feel of the typical online travel agency search tool and turns the process into something far more experiential and visually engaging. The process is broken into three steps: describing who's traveling, selecting a few interests, and selecting what's most important in terms of hotel options and accommodations. The entire decision-making process occurs within a beach environment, carefully constructed using a combination of still photography, video, 3-D animation and compositing. Results wash ashore in the form of postcards, highlighting the ideal beach for the user, as well as a few alternatives; the option to view additional hotels appears in a sortable list. The back-end logic is quite complex and works hard to carefully find the correct hotel out of over 450 possible results, based on the combination of preferences the user has selected. MyIdealBeach.com offers consumers a different way to search for travel and aspires to fill a need that no online travel agency was satisfying at the time of launch.

Client: Orbitz, LLC
Date published: Spring 2008
Role: Information Architecture, Design & Sound
Studio: 15 letters inc.

Click for team details

Creative director: Tim Irvine
Project manager: Jayme Kuramitsu
IA & design: Matthew Mercer
Lead Flash developer: Glenn Blicharz
Database developer: Rich Hanson
3-D illustration: Dominic Vallone
Videography: Mark Lind
Flash animation: Alberto Parera
Sound: Matthew Mercer & Mark Lind
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Related projects:
Orbitz Games
Atlantis Events