Increasing the conversion rate by offering travelers a better user experience.
Booking.com is one of the world’s leading digital travel companies. They connect millions of travelers with memorable experiences, a variety of transportation options, and places to stay – from homes to hotels and more.
I joined one of the product teams in March 2018 as UX Designer and Team Lead. The team focused on the user experience of visitors on touch devices, such as tablets. The primary business goal was to bring a touch-optimized platform to more users first. And second, to maintain feature parity with the rest of the platforms. Both with the aim of optimizing the conversion rate for hotel stays.
Discovery kick-off
I started with market research to gain more insight into our target audience. I’ve collected competitive insights, human interaction studies, and tablet usage data points. Next, I looked at internal data and investigations. I analyzed Google Analytics data, surveys, diary studies, research, and dogfooding reports. I searched for patterns and isolated the main user needs. This helped me and other team members explore the problem space in many different ways.
Understanding users' pain points
In the define phase, we synthesized these results to create a detailed overall picture. We decided to focus on one key user pain point, which we continued to see in analytical data and qualitative feedback. Users had trouble choosing a hotel due to the amount and structure of the information on the page, which negatively impacted conversion. Our goal: Help our users on touch devices find the relevant information so they can make an informed decision to book a hotel.
Fast learning with an iterative design process
I led the ideation phase and organized several brainstorms with the rest of the UX team to improve the user experience on the hotel page. I explored many solutions and went back and forth in the design process. Collecting data from similar successful a/b tests on other platforms, testing accessibility issues, and iterating on the sketches and ideas.
Based on the user’s needs, I designed an improved version of the hotel page that gives the user more clarity about the accommodation, where to stay, the relevant facilities, and the difference between the rooms.
I took a lean UX approach to validate our ideas. I split the final design into 15 separate user stories. Which I coordinated with engineering and product until delivery. Two months after the start of this project, we had more than 25 experiments (a/b tests) running to validate our hypothesis with the end-users.
I created 15 user stories that we validated with 25 separate a/b tests.
Higher conversion through better UX
We have been able to increase the conversion of bookings. By decluttering information and showing only the relevant facilities for the user segment. I learned through blackout experiments and customer service ticket monitoring what information was important or irrelevant to our users.
We have tried, failed, and repeated many experiments. In the end, we managed to launch 7 improvements that had a conclusively positive effect on the net conversion.
More than half of the tests also saw a drop in inbound customer service tickets. As a UX designer, I take pride in helping our users by providing the relevant information while increasing conversion at the same time.
My role
- Leading an iterative, data-driven design process
- Research: Collecting and analyzing different data sources
- Encouraging the team to work on more user-centric stories
- Executing the plan through experiments and iterations
- Facilitating brainstorming and co-creation sessions
- Creating high-fidelity prototypes
- Setting up a/b tests
