Valve Vacation
Transforming the complex logistics of Valve’s annual vacation into a care-free employee experience.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Company
Valve
Platforms
Web, iOS & Android
Year
2024
Valve is an American gaming software developer that hosts an annual, all-expenses paid vacation for all employees and their families - a logistical undertaking involving hundreds of people traveling to Hawaii. My team at In2event BV was tasked with designing and developing the custom registration website to handle this massive event.
The Core Challenges
The system needed to efficiently manage multi-user registration under strict deadlines, while maintaining Valve’s brand experience. The platform needed to seamlessly tackle the following challenges:
Complex Data Structure | Dynamic Booking Flow | Activity Conflict Prevention |
|---|---|---|
Registering the main employee and multiple accompanying family members (including children), each requiring specific dietary, passport, and travel details. | Allowing employees to select preferred flights (from chartered options) and hotel room types, and dynamically update availability in real-time. | Handling multi-person activity sign ups, while preventing single travelers to double book specific dates and times. |
First sketches for the activity sign up displayed in a calendar view
Process & Solutions: Design Strategy
A. Information Architecture & Flow
The process focussed on reducing cognitive load by breaking down complex registration into five digestible steps, guided by a persistent stepper indicator.
Key Design Decisions:
Multi-Party Registration: Employee and guest sign-ups were separated, allowing the employee to register each person one-by-one, ensuring all data was complete before continuing to the next step.
Progressive Disclosure: Sign up information was progressively disclosed either by separating content into digestible steps or by hiding advanced fields behind toggles or expandable sections.
Overview of the registration steps for the 5 main phases: Employee/Guest registration, Flights, Hotels, Activities, Payment.
B. Booking & Selection Interface
The most critical and complex sections of the platform were the selection of flights, hotel rooms, and activities, which involved dynamic constraints and multi-person registration.
Challenge 1: Flight Selection
Solution: Clear, comparative presentation of charted flight options and ability to request custom flights.
Implementation: A card-based layout for flight options showing departure/arrival times, flight duration, local time, and available seats (crucial for shared capacity).
Challenge 2: Hotel Room Allocation
Solution: Dynamic room constraints and visual confirmation.
Implementation: A simple form providing clear information and visuals on the room type options with real-time feedback of room type capacity.
Challenge 3: Activity Sign-Up
Solution: Preventing double booking and capacity overflow.
Implementation: An interactive personal calendar view that shows your activity schedule, with an sidebar displaying all activities with their respective capacities, (credit) costs, activity details, and sign up form. The platform automatically shows whether it conflicts with any existing activities and shows real-time capacity.
Flight selection card view
Hotel room booking form
Personal activity calendar
C. Visual Design & Aesthetics
The visual design followed the guidelines provided by Valve and were expanded and aligned to the vacation destination to create a unique and compelling experience for the user.
Color Palette: The provided color palette was expanded to include multiple tints that were used throughout the platform and aligned with the beach, earth, forest, and sea of the Hawaiian islands.
Typography: To ensure legibility of crucial data we used the provided font only for headings and used Inter for all body text.
Mobile Responsive: The platform was designed responsively to ensure all complex layouts gracefully adapted to mobile devices for on-the-go registration and detail checking.
Mobile responsive screens allow for on-the-go registration and activity insights.
Final UI Color Palette
Results & Outcomes
The Valve Vacation registration platform was successfully deployed two years in a row, resulting in an exceptionally smooth experience for both employees, vendors, and the client’s events team.
Reduced Errors | Positive User Feedback | Long-Term Partnership |
|---|---|---|
Forced validation and clear data guidance significantly reduced discrepancies, minimizing manual follow-up for the client’s events team. | Employees praised the platform’s usability, clarity of booking, and ease of activity sign-up with the personal calendar. | The success of the platform and continuous improvements resulted in a long-term partnership with Valve. |
“(...) you did an amazing job with the site this year. The new calendar views and pre-reg/reg flows were all really well designed (...). I racked my brain for feedback and couldn’t really even think of any optional suggestions.”