Problem Space

FindHotel (now Vio.com) brings together the best hotel deals around the globe. On FindHotel users can access the best deals not available elsewhere.

In hotel booking industry, one nature of the user behavior is that once travelers decide the desired location/ accommodation, they always want to find the best prices. So even if they've already booked multiple times through a website before, they still don't mind booking elsewhere if there is a better price. That's why having experiences i.e. membership programs that help build trust and loyalty is crucial in booking platforms. So the challenge was:

How might we design a membership experience that encourages our customers to book again with us?

Product/ UX Metrics

Based on the HMW statement, we set the number of 2nd-time bookings as our main metric. If we could increase that, it's a good indicator that the solution is impacting the user behaviour and we're increasing the loyalty within the product.

My Role

Product Designer

contribution

Secondary Research
User Journey Mapping
End-to-End Design
Feedback Sessions
Design QA

Platform

Responsive Website
(Mobile and Desktop)

team

1x Product Manager
1x Product Designer
1x User Researcher
1x Data Analyst
1x UX Writer
4x Engineer

duration

5 months

The Outcome

The deliverable included new features and flows of Plus program added to the booking flow of guest users, members and Plus members, as well as the design of the membership page. It also covered the structure of series of emails tailored to the membership program and the SMS flow for users who enrol via text message.

This feature and the effort of the team led to an 40% increase in the number of returning customers (more details on the definition on Impact Section).

Here is the final design where for guest users activating Plus membership.

Delve Into The Design Process

While it's always hard to stick to a perfect process and that there were moments of doubts, going back and forth, and rethinking our outcome, I can tell our approach falls under a double diamond approach where I started to benchmark, study different loyalty programs in different industries and understanding the dynamics, then getting user feedbacks and narrowing down the solutions through the projects.

Brainstorm Sessions

The first step for me was to understand different aspects of the project and align with the stakeholders on the vision of the membership program. I conducted different brainstorm sessions and with the help of the team, we created a shared understanding of the goal of our loyalty program.

* Note: regarding the naming, logo and branding of the program we decided to not spend much time for now as we wanted to rebrand the whole product in near future. So with a quick research and iteration around it, we chose the name "Plus" for the membership and picked purple for its brand color.

For Whom We Are Building?

Based on the past research that was done by our user researchers and customer interviews, we assume we have 7 different personas that use our product. After having a couple of discussions with the product manager, design lead and our CSO, we agreed that we first need to target 2 types of our personas:

- Frequent travelers who knows the ins and out of the travel industry and looking for a product with a good offering that they can use for their trips. These groups are usually more open to explore new things and new websites.
- Value seekers who spend a lot of time finding the best deals with the lowest price for their accommodation. If these groups get introduced to our membership program and the benefits they can access, they have high motivations to join.

Competitor Analysis

After the initial brainstorm and alignments, now it was time for me to start benchmarking good references and learn from them. I mapped the whole flow of a couple of loyalty programs within the traveling and other industries to have a 360-degree view of what others are doing and to generate ideas and opportunities for us.

Here is the booking flow of Booking.com which has one of the best loyalty programs in the traveling industry where there are lots of insights and smart decisions that we could learn from. For example, 2 good learning from Genius were:
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- They start minimal talking about Genius and gradually increase communication as the user goes through the booking funnel.
- They always connect the program with the amount of discount user gets so the user has a clear understanding of Genius benefits.

Core Message Flow

One main challenge was how to communicate Plus to users without adding friction to the booking flow and hurting the conversion rate. When users land on the search page they mostly check the deal, amenities and the price and not interested to know about the membership benefit. So with the help of our UX writer we listed user concerns and doubts on each step of the funnel and and discussed what we should tell on each step. This helped me a lot on the visual level to what and where it is best to add an element regarding Plus.

Here is the core message we decided to communicate from the search page to email and SMS based on each user type (guest, member and Plus member):

Design Iterations

By this time I already had all the aspects I needed to know for starting on the interface and UI part.

For each part I was preparing a couple of iterations and sharing with the team. After multiple rounds of feedback we reached sets of designs that everyone was happy with and we were confident that it meets the requirements.

Test The Solution

Now we needed to validate our solution and see if our solution makes sense to the users as well. Based on what flow and designs, we decided to conduct 2 sets of interviews, one for guest flow and one for Plus flow.
- Notice the Plus membership section?
- Can they explain the benefit of membership that they have joined?

For already Plus members the question we had was:
- When they book a Plus deal, do they understand that it is an exclusive offer available only for them (it's not just a random offer that they found)?
- Can they explain why they have access to this exclusive deal?

I teamed up with our user researcher and explained her the designs and what we need to test. We decided to set up two separate rounds of interviews each with 5 participants; one for the guest flow and the other one for the Plus flow.

With the results we could see that almost all the participants noticed the Plus section and understood the steps. One challenge we noticed was that the copy we used on the guest prototype was unclear for some participants and they were mentioning "I wish I could know more before I click the button".

So we decided to add more information about Plus in the bottom sheet and turn it into an expandable sheet where users can get more details about Plus before enrolling in it.

Preparing For The Launch

After adjusting the design based on the user tests, we were ready to hand off the designs. I meet with the engineering team and presented the final flows and designs.

In that step we also discussed with our product analyst on what we should track and where we should run AB test.

My Takeaways

This project had many challenges that I had to focus on and find a solution for it and during the project I learned many new things. One learning for me was how to improve my hand offs to developers. Since it was a big project with many pages and components, I noticed some design details were missed during the implementation. So I added some sticky cards under each designs where needed to help our engineers.
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The other learnings for me was that since there were a lot of copy writings involved in the project, I read the Copy Writer's Handbook by Robert W. Bly to bring suggestions on how we make a clear communication while we make it interesting for the user.

Here is the summary of the book worth to look at 😉

Looking To The Future

The design of Plus membership is an ongoing process and we're constantly iterating based on feedback from users. In the next phases, we're planning to increase the presence of Plus and enhance its comprehensiveness, meaning that users have a better understanding of the program and its benefits.

Special Thanks

For this project I would like to thank our design lead Jakub Wojciechowski who was giving very insightful design feedback during the design critiques sessions. Also, Thanks to Soheyla Asadi, our user research lead who helped during the validation phase by overseeing the interviews and ensuring we gained valuable feedback from the user interviews.