As always, it begins with an idea.
Spark was created to introduce a beautiful and intuitive design to our diverse product suite, inspire and delight our users (as well as the travel industry) and create efficiency within our development lifecycles.
Efficiency is especially key to our initiative. Having a common language of readymade building blocks opens up time to focus on more sophisticated aspects of software development, such as understanding user needs, streamlining complex workflows and introducing innovations that will drive benefit to our customers and end-users.
Know the basics of beauty.
Our approach has been as much about people as it is process. To create a design language that scales to fit the diversity of our products, from consumer-facing applications to data-intensive business solutions, we brought together a dedicated, cross-functional team of designers and developers to collaborate closely across all phases of the language creation.
We established guiding principles to help inform and direct our decisions, and we identified early on that our primary goal was to blend beautiful design with intuitiveness and strong ease-of-use. This desire to drive a consumer-grade experience into the realm of business software serves as the foundation of our language.
Community engagement has also been critical to our process. We look to our peers across the design community to help us understand how specific patterns are used in applications today, and we established a review panel to provide feedback - and challenge us - along the way.
What we do
Discovery
We team with our designers to understand user needs for interacting with our portfolio of products. Plus, our UX research analysts keep a pulse on understand emerging best practices of user interfaces in other industries.
Design
When research indicates the need, we design components and patterns, then usability test them with users in context of the types of workflows they will support.
Code
We write the HTML, CSS and Javascript as needed while keeping the code as resource-light as possible. We ensure our code scales responsively across various device types. (and is tested across the most popular browsers and operating systems.)
Deploy
After testing the code, we publish it to our worldwide development organization and conduct ongoing training and workshops. Our eager fans convert these into the various frameworks across the product family.
