User Research - Booking Hotels

We looked at past surveys and user interviews, as well as conducted another round of user interviews consisting of our target market of comparison shoppers. After learning about their typical travel booking process and pain points, we defined actionable insights.

Listed as a top prioritiy	% of Users
Location of the hotel	64
Price per night	32
Aesthetics (photos)	20

We found out what their top frustration was while booking hotels (or travel in general) on mobile, and 92% of users commented about the screen size being "too small for comparing prices and options." This research helped us zone in on the objective of this project during our cross-functional ideation session with designers, engineers, and product manager.

The Objective

Our users face analysis paralysis when comparing too many options during their hotel search, and this is even more frustrating on a small screen. With the help of our network-wide data, we hypothesized that users are less interested in comparing entire hotel sites and instead want to be guided directly to the specific hotels that meet their preferences.

The objective was to create a product to help the user decide where they want to stay by narrowing options as quickly and efficiently as possible. Building the right experience would meet both the user need and the business goal of improving mobile conversions for our travel site partners.

Ideation + Wireframes

The main output for our ideation session was defining the MVP. In order to test early, we scoped this project to the top 10 most-searched cities for V1. Given that according to our user research, the top priority for choosing a hotel was location, we decided to create a mobile meta search site with a map interface and nick-named it Map Meta.

Our design would point users to specific hotels that met their preferences by leveraging our network of top travel sites, extracting those hotels, and streamlining the hotel card format - allowing them to skip the overwhelming browsing process.

Rapid Iterative Design

We invited users 3 times a week to usability test our prototype, synthesize learnings, and iterate quickly. Our goal was to understand whether the experience felt intuitive and presented accommodation information in a helpful way for users to make their decision and continue with booking. The scenario we gave our users was: You're planning a trip to Chicago this year and looking to book a hotel reservation. Visit the Map Meta site, and select the hotel that you're interested in. The qualitative insights we gathered from our usability tests (n = 14) are summarized below:

Map Meta - Now Live

Working closely with our PM and engineers, I helped prep for the release of our Map Meta site for split testing against our previous mobile hotel product. It is currently live on select travel sites, appearing whenever our real-time predictions categorizes a user as likely to comparison shop on other travel sites in our network. Not only are we providing a utility for mobile site users looking to book the right hotel, we're adhering to the business goal of driving more mobile traffic and conversions to our partners.

Conclusion

Early numbers suggest that this has been well-received by site visitors, with an interaction rate (synonymous to click-through rate, or clicks over number of times our map rendered) that has become one of the highest across our network, and it is currently monetizing 25% better than our previous hotel product!

Our team will continue to monitor these numbers and improve usability with each iteration. Next steps include adding more functionality and customizability within the search form and eventually supporting all destinations when Map Meta is productized and offered to all of our global network of travel sites. Back to projects