How One Company Put its Logo to Work and Boosted Revenue by 10% a Year

HotelTonight has one of the best logos we’ve seen in a long time – simple yet extremely smart. And it doesn’t just look good, it works! The simple lowercase “h” design was purposefully created to look like a bed and what’s even more clever is how they’re using it to impact the metrics of the business in terms of the results.

HotelTonight is an app that helps users find last-minute details on hotel rooms in three taps. These bookings are generally non-refundable. Prior to the development of the new bookings interface, HotelTonight was experiencing unintentional bookings of about two in every 1,000. Complaints and time spent processing refunds were at an all time high. HT began to look for a design solution, hoping that a clearer user interface would stop the confusion for customers and bolster the company's bottom line. And it found one.

HotelTonight engineer Ray Lillywhite came up with the solution to make the elongated “h” logo a slide bar that users have to trace their finger along to book a hotel. Because of this, accidental bookings dropped, and non-completion of the booking process dropped by 75 percent, according to Fast Company Design. The non-measurable results can’t be ignored either. It’s memorable and different from what’s out there, making it certain to capture mindshare.

This kind of integration of logo and UI is part of a larger trend—logos aren't just logos anymore. For HotelTonight, the logo doubles as an unlocking mechanism for booking a hotel room. Both are more than just a visual system. They extend the brand beyond the surface-level identity and turn it into a functional tool for the user—a key to the future of branding.

Image: via HotelTonight  |  Article adapted from Multiple sources including fastcodesign.com; Katherine Schwab