White-label
Design System

LateRooms was where I moved from digital design into UX and UI, and where my focus shifted from how things look to how they work.

Working on white-label sites taught me to design with accessibility and user behaviour in mind, and to ground decisions in research and conversion goals rather than taste.

LateRooms was expanding on two fronts at once: adding new features to the main site, and building a white-label experience site to sell to travel companies, letting their customers bundle a holiday into a single purchase.

Every partner would arrive with its own brand, but the product underneath had to stay the same. Without a shared system, each new site risked becoming a separate design and a separate build.

With a background in branding, I led the design system for the main brand and for the white-label sites, starting with the partners: Virgin Escapes and National Express Holidays.

Each partner got the same structure with its own values in it. Every pair below shows Virgin Escapes on the left and National Express Holidays on the right.

The design systems and the assets in them became the basis of the pages the UX designers in the team created, and the reference developers built from.

Components were documented with every state they could be in, so a page designer could pick one up and a developer could build it without needing to ask.

Both sites bundled a UK holiday (travel, accommodation and attractions) into one purchase. That made it a long and complex journey, so clear, consistent information mattered at every step.

Once a bundle was built, the journey had to hold several bookings together (a show, a hotel, a coach or rail ticket) and still read as one trip. The same components carried it through to the end in both brands.

The partner sites were designed and built on the system before LateRooms entered administration.