OVERVIEW
Tripadvisor’s vacation rentals business vertical transitioned to become a complete meta provider – making its lesser known brand Holiday Lettings the default booking page for its own inventory. It therefore became crucial to test and make improvements to the Holiday Lettings booking experience.
MY ROLE
I led the design and research in close collaboration with the Product Manager – with support from a User researcher, Copy writer and Design Manager.
Approach
Based on data insights, competitor research, and design critiques, the team put together a hypothesis which led to ideas & improvements that were evaluated via two design concepts in user tests.
It was essential to understand how travelers find the existing booking flow to know points of uncertainty, missing information, or aspects that lower booking confidence – before showing the new concepts.
Existing Design
The original page is cluttered, lengthy, and not on-brand. There is also a lack of clarity in the payment process. All these factors could result in users making errors, feeling frustrated or doubtful, and eventually dropping off.
Design Concept 1
A clean and concise one-page form design, with a focus on transparency.
Design Concept 2
Staged across 3 steps – with a focus on guidance and a conversational tone.
Express Checkout Flow
Walking travellers through a quicker overall booking process by signing-in.
Refund Protect
Testing traveler perception and price expectation towards a refund protection product add-on.
Revised Booking Flow
The user tests reaffirmed that our revised designs were preffered over the existing experience due to the following factors:
- Fixing the basics – Making the page more on-brand and visually consistent not only led to a cleaner UI, but also bolstered creditibitly and trust.
- Transparency in the booking process: Clarity in each booking step and what is required from it, preparing travelers for the next steps and shortening the gap between owners and guests – all led to much higher booking confidence.
Additionally, we learnt that the booking flow design needed to be adapted to suit the platform – to provide a smooth and frictionless experience on both kinds of devices.
For Desktop, users preferred a clean, one page format which clearly shows all relevant information up front.
Mobile users preferred a staged step-by-step format, which allowed users to focus on each step without feeling overwhelmed.
