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2nd Address Book Beyond

Perfecting the end-to-end Guest Booking Experience 

Project Overview

2ND ADDRESS // is an two-sided marketplace connecting  guests traveling for business or long vacations with hosts, allowing them to book premium furnished homes for extended stays. A marketplace like 2nd Address, thrives on a great booking flow experience. 
 
PROBLEM //  Designed in 2015, 2nd Address' Lease/Booking Application Flow had become outdated. Guests were finding it difficult to book homes with ease and had looking waiting period to get host confirmation and sign lease. 
It had too much information field for  guests to book easily. In order to quickly seed and grow new markets outside of San Francisco, as well as respond to our users, we needed a smooth booking flow  
 
GOAL/NORTH STAR  With the given problem our solution was to redesign the end-to-end booking flow experience for the guest which takes aways all their anxieties from the point of discovery till the end of their stay. 
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My ROLE // As a lead Product/UX designer, I was responsible for driving  the overall conceptualization, design and execution and launch of this experience as well as doing all the hands-on design work.

SPECIALITIES

UX Design

Interaction Design

Information Architecture

UI Design

Visual Design

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TIME DURATION

2-3 months 

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LAUNCHED

March 208

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KEY USER EXPERIENCES DESIGNED

GUEST/BOOKER

BOOKING

FLOW

GUESTS/SIGNEE

PROVIDING 

INFORMATION

HOST

ACCEPTS/DECLINES

BOOKING

GUEST/HOST

BOOKING FLOW

EMAILS

CARE/OPS

BOOKING DASHBOARD 

+CONTROLS

DISCOVERY 

Understanding the Problem

I started with doing the audit of our current experience.  Booking  Experience had too many challenges from the price stack and landing page itself for the users which is critical for Guests to pursue booking. The main booking flow had outdated visual components and guests were to provide a lot of information, documents, sign lease  to book, which may be required for rental leases, but we had definitely had a need to make this experience more smoother and frictionless. There was no instant booking options.
 
The hosts and guests  were to sign separate docusign leases once the booking dates and booking request was confirmed by the hosts. The process was a long haul process definite to frustrate the hosts and guests. 

DISCOVERY 

User Research 

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I with my product manager and contract researcher  did user interviews over our customers. We found three types of guests who were booking with us which included corporate travel managers,  guests themselves, international guests, guests with person outside guest list giving guarantees.  We tried to understand their core values, motivations, pain points & needs. Our insights were that we need to create three kind of booking flows. As well as allow them to have social logins, ask for less documentation and give them different payment options. 

Understand our Guest Segmentation & Attributes

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User Interviews, Surveys & Creating Personas

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DISCOVERY 

Process Research

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For creating a great end-to-end and fast booking process it was critical we create a better process  and service blueprint for background checks and lease agreement sign. We also wanted to be change the emotional language of our experience and wanted to ascertain what terms we could use  and what point which process needs to kick in.  I  assisted my product manager creating a questionnaire for all the open questions we had  to streamline our booking flow. We had interview sessions with our care/ops team and Background Check Center vendor team to know what all pieces of information were essentially critical to ask our Guests for 30+ day and how they will integrate with our system to qualify our guests. 

End-To-End Booking Flow experience

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DEFINE VISION

UX Strategy & Product Features/Flow

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Guests book with ease and joy on 2nd Address​​​. ​
  • Omnichannel - Guests should be able to book from any device, e.g. desktop, tablet or smartphonne
  • Easy and facilitated - Guest taken by the hand, empathetic of the guest(s) situation while booking, e.g. anxiety due to short booking window...
  • Clear and Speedy - no jargons and confusions, no long waiting to approvals
  • Credible and trustworthy - transparent, no hidden information, responsive, reliable, positive perceptions, “I can trust it”
  • Efficient & Uneventful - No conversion leaks, LL and listing is vetted. Property is available.
  • Payable - guest can pay with their preferred payment choice
  • Delightful & Welcoming Experience- fun and pleasant
  • Hosts get qualified, leasing-ready guests they can trust
  • Guests and hosts can engage end to end.  The marketplace operates fully online and is scalable.
    • Ops is free end-to-end for most use cases
    • Ops can track, intervene and help bookings with ease and cost effectively
  • 2nd Address gets recognized as an  experience and memorable for hospitality. 
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DEFINE STRATEGY, FEATURES & FLOWS 

Initial Ideas & 'Aha' moments

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From all the insights we gathered about the process and user research, we started mapping out the end -to-end flows and all touchpoints and came up with early concepts as to how we can reduce the time of converting a booking request to to booking conformation.

  • We came up with ideas as to bifurcate our bookings depending on who is taking the responsibility of the booking : corporate booking, person outside guest list or guest itself. 

  • We came up with ideas that since the booker may not have all the information in hand of all guests, can the booker quickly request them to add the information through email, thus reducing friction for them to finish the booking.

  • We decided we will allow out guests to make payment  in three options : only booking fee, first month payment, or full when the booking is confirmed by the host. 

  • We also decided to display nightly prices in price stack instead of monthly prices to stay competitive with the market.  Also we decided we would not roll up total payment across months in price stack but would show the breakdown in the payment modal and continue to show nightly price with taxes and  any fees within the price stack.  

 

There were many such decisions that were taken at this stage which would crystallize later as we get on the design board itself. These decisions were taken with buy-in from all stakeholders and senior leadership.  Also these flows were crystallized and iterated as we get into more detailed design and 

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DESIGN
Sketching UX Flows 
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IDEATION
Sketching UX Flows 
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From all the insights we gathered about the process and user research, we started mapping out the end -to-end flows and all touchpoints and came up with early concepts as to how we can reduce the time of converting a booking request to to booking conformation.

Image uploaded from iOS.jpg
Image uploaded from iOS (1).jpg
CONCEPTUAL DESIGN 
Wire-framing Flows & Input Fields.

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From all the insights we gathered about the process and user research, we created the conceptual frames to validates the flows and fields needed to be filled by the user and how we could minimize the friction .

Swati UX Design Portfolio 2018.010.jpeg

DETAILED DESIGN

Mobile Web Experience  

Listing Page Price Stack Mobile Flow 

30+ day rental booking for furnished homes

3 Step Process for lease agreement - 3 kinds of booking, 3 kinds of method to pay 

Detailed information about guests, guarantor, corporation for background/criminal checks.

Easy way to request information from other signee or guests.

7-28 nights booking

Booking Received 

Different Stages.

1 Step Flow - Simplified Booking

Guest Booking Flow

DESIGN SOLUTION
Interactive Prototype  

Guarantor Accepts Booking
Host Accepts Booking

DELIVER 

Hand-off, Development Support & QA 

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Once our designs were validated and refined, I delivered all the styleguides, pattern library, specification through invision, assets to our engineering team. I was doing daily checkups if any design guides were needed from my side. Once the built was ready. I did the whole front end QA as well we had bug bash to report any bugs. 

Reading Corner

POST - LAUNCH

Learn & Optimize

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Once the redesigned product was launched, we partnered with our analytics team to dive into metrics as how the whole booking conversion was performing, where the drop off was happening. We did usability tests on live products and start uncovering more frictions points.

3x 

INCREASE IN

BOOKING COMPLETED

1/2x

TIME TAKEN FOR BOOKING TO HOST CONFIRMATION

2x

INCREASE IN

LEASES SIGNED

DESIGN SPRINT

Care/Ops Booking Control 

The goal of this project was to presents the stages and status of the booking cycle after the booking is received to the Care and Ops. while also enabling a number of controls for them to process bookings and manage every stage of stay.

 

This new booking cycle design and the associated flagging and control features was to help simplify operations and logic used to affect behaviors across the product, whether it is in Search, Calendar or the Host Dashboard booking and payment information.  The idea was to help the product be easier to maintain, develop and test.

Care Booking Dashboard

Care Booking Screen

FINAL THOUGHTS 

Learnings & Takeaways 

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  • Never presume and believe there is parity between what user's tell they will do as  and what they will really do. 
  • Always research your product  and UX strategy and solution will scale and grow. 
  • Be humble and ready to fail, while giving the best. 
  • Keep evolving your designs and be ready to make big changes if need be. 
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