PRIYA GOON - TRAVELSPICE

TRAVELSPICE

Introduction:

Online hotel booking is a regular task. You choose a hotel on an online platform and book a hotel by paying the money they ask for it. How will you feel if you can decide the price and get a room as per your mentioned standard or star category? Nice, right?

Travelspice.com is an online hotel booking platform where you can do blind bidding for a list of hotels. Whichever hotel chooses your bid, you get a room in that hotel. Simply, you chose the city area, star level and quote your price. Within in 24 hours you get a hotel booked as per your preference at hopefully your preferred price.

I redesigned the UX and branding and added gamification elements to completely reimagine their desktop site and mobile web / app. Other than that I also did a lot of visual design for marketing collaterals.

THE PROBLEM :

Travelspice.com wanted to enhance their experience and also increase their user base. People were checking out the webapp but regularly dropping off. They were not able to convert visitors into paying customers.

What research threw up :

After I did some user research I realized that there were 6 key points.

Users didnt understand what the site was offering. (the concept of bidding was not clear).
Users missed out a clear sequence of where they were in the app and when they would get their winning bid.
Users didnt understand why they had to pay upfront before placing their final bid. ( the concept of bidding for an extremely low rate only works if hotels get an already assured payment).
They were not very clear what were the shortlisted hotels or what the star ratings featured.
They didnt feel motivated to pay upfront to BID as they were not sure what was the probability of them getting a hotel.
The site and apps branding DID NOT inspire trust . It felt a bit shady.

PERSONAS

The personas were developed from end user research and a combination of Facebook and Web analytics. There was a big digital marketing budget and the site was getting a lot of unique users from the paid ads (which I designed too). I found that a lot of users coming to the site seemed to be having an iphone and also well travelled abroad (maybe exposed to Priceline.com). Thus based on these parameters I developed 2 personas which helped me to target the design to an urban , aspirational yet value conscious demographic.

2 main personas: 24 years old Shailja, who wants to travel and enjoy luxury hotels in a tight budget. Another is senior executive Bhuban, for whom time is a big issue. He wants an assured booking in ANY luxury hotel in a particular category.

Low Fi concept Sketches for the mobile website/app

Wireframes of mobile website

key pain points solved

One of the big issues with the UI was that users were never going to know what hotel they would get immediately after paying for it. Most of the time the users were lost in the booking process and there was no clear understanding how many steps there were and how close they were to placing a bid.