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Tripping.com is a short term rentals metasearch site that compiles results across Booking.com, VRBO, Airbnb, and other short term stay companies. With millions of visits a day, my role was focused on Growth Performance and the Platform Redesign as we geared up to provide innovations like instant booking and mobile first designs.
As the sole designer for this start up from 2015-2017, I worked directly with Co-founders Jen O’Neal and Jeff Manheimer, while collaborating closely VP of Product, Colin Gardiner, as well as engineering leads and contributors across the product design work.
For user research, I worked closely with Tyler Swartz, Product Manager, as well as Anne Harris, one of our product marketing associates. We also did a brand refresh which included UX research and personas, during which I worked closely with our founders and our VP of Marketing
We set out to improve the user experience (and thus conversion) by providing a facelift to the existing journey. We were tracking the following metrics: Revenue per Unique Visitor, Lifetime Value per Customer
The primary use case for Tripping.com was to provide comparison shopping experience to de-duplicating listings. With this redesign, we wanted to overhaul filtering and reinvent the search UX to improve the traffic quality we were driving to partner sites.
This redesign also meant our first mobile friendly responsive UX, so multiple device considerations were key.
"If I could wave a magic wand, it would be an experience that gives me just 5 of the best results."
We kicked off research alongside a larger effort to update our branding. We asked customers to walk us through a vacation planning scenario that incorporated their web search.
As discoveries were made, user stories would be backlogged and prioritized for various design & engineering sprints.
With my product manager, we executed the following process:
1. Audit product UI & conduct Heuristic Analysis to identify problem areas within the site.
2. Through quantitative discovery, identify user groups & conduct behavior survey with 500 participants who used vacation rentals in the last year.
3. Research 1:1 with 15 individuals to get an understanding of existing issues within current product.
4. Identify traffic sources and marketing channels with the marketing team.
5. Organize user feedback, problem statements, and feature ideas by complexity & Impact
This project required a few concurrent design efforts. On the one hand, we had a new technology we needed to support with an updated ui, while minimizing structural changes as to not disrupt the SEO framework that the operation relied on. On the other, we needed to build a net-new front end, so an entire UI system needed to be created to support our development team.
Design Approach
Define visual identity for brand and UI systems.
Simplify key workflows and simplify information architecture.
Explore and rapidly iterate on key feature interactions.
Generate rich prototypes and high-fidelity concept mocks for fundraising efforts.
Deliverables:
User Flows, Wireframes, High fidelity mocks, and Prototypes.
Micro-interactions including date range selector, filter bar, map markers.Animations & CSS specifications .
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With the backend real time search results build underway, we switched gears and started designing out our UI Kit. Knowing there was a concurrent rebranding, we built our front end system with common frameworks and Sasskit to ensure we could easily update elements like color and font.
The core of our search experience was offering a real-time results feed of available vacation rentals. We iterated on our UI/UX until we found the right balance of information, a11y support, and ease of use.
Our servers could return thousands of listings in some of our more popular markets, so a comprehensive filter experience for desktop and mobile was key.
To add to the experience, we incorporated features like Pricing Displacement and Search Tags.
With an active site garnering 2MM hits per day, we were meticulous about testing the changes we made to the site. This included larger format A/B tests, like the layout, design of our search results cards, and micro-interactions for search support.
The most important feature in our product was our comparison pricing UX—it was our unique proposition which displayed the best deal on a given short term rental in real time. It was also the button that drove our traffic to partner sites—the core of our revenue as a referral traffic platform.
We tested to ensure traffic sent to our partners was qualified, and that customers were finding properties they were ready to book.
In our v2 search experience, users had shorter overall search time, but visited more pages of results and clicked less, with significant improvement for parter-side conversions given that users were more likely to enter their trip dates.
Searches that included at least one filter beyond dates also increased significantly, telling us that filters were much more discoverable in v2 when compared with v1.
My first project when joining Tripping.com was to help the team finish up an instant booking experience. At the time, booking a vacation rental could take 3, sometimes 4 days as many vacation rental owners did not accept online payments and required booking by phone.
v1
v2
Tripping had a unique deal with Booking.com to pilot a program with their new instant booking API. We set an aggressive delivery goal of 2 weeks for our v1 iteration, took 6 months of learnings, and then delivered our v2 experience alongside our search app redesign.
At the time, booking short term rentals was difficult. Airbnb was still taking off, and had yet to set the standard for instantly available rentals. Most of our partner sites didn't offer instant booking, and coordination with the host required a minimum of 3-5 days to inquire, book, and confirm a customer's rental request.
Instant booking drove 100M bookings to Booking.com in the first quarter.
The updated experience was the first mobile responsive design on Tripping.com, which matched the upward trend in mobile visitors, about 20% growth MoM in 2015.
The V2 UI was delivering in H2 2016 and saw increased engagement, as well as a reduction in customer complaints thanks to our transparent breakdown of costs and seamless booking experience.
