UX Case Study

tiket.com Hotel product design

The background

This project was not a brief-based project from PM or business team but fully being initiated by the design team. During this project, we were exploring end-to-end user journey in hotel-booking process and revamping the entire flow, structure, and design.

One of the things that I love about working in this project, is the chance to re-design and work across multiple cases and processes. From pre-purchase pages (landing page, search result page, etc.) to post purchase pages (refund, reschedule, etc.), there are a never-ending improvements and collaborative processes with multiple stakeholders.

In different perspective, as we are working alongside PM, tech, and other functions to execute briefs, business initiatives, and fulfilling our OKRs, we never really had the time to think about the whole end-to-end booking process and rather, we were bounded to only do one chunk of projects in one time. The implications? Unclear user flow and a lot of post-release problems because we didn’t think about end-to-end process and moreover, we didn’t really establish guidelines and SOP on how to maintain each page, resulting in random components being added to pages. Therefore, this project was such an opportunity for the design team to ‘fix’ the entire information structure and create a continuous user flow.

The old flow

The old version of Hotel-booking flow

The old flow was barely a flow. It was merely a common practice — the way hotel-booking journey is conducted through out platforms and markets. It’s started from pre-purchase through several steps, then purchase, and ended in post-purchase. Even though this flow was pretty straightforward, in terms of design and growth, this did not accommodate a lot of things that we need to create not only a functional product but a user-friendly one (intentions, user’s touch points, goals and guidelines that were needed to continuously deliver the right message to our users, no matter the changes/improvements.)

The method

We used a simple intention-problem-solution method to get to know the general idea of hotel-booking flow, as well as pain points in each pages according to several perspectives: business, product, user, and design. With approaching this 4 stakeholders, we wanted to deep dive on a more holistic angle and as a goal, creating a journey that is not only suitable for business objective or user only but the whole role represented in this product.

We started by interviewing and gathering intentions from these 4 roles :

• Corporate strategy/ C level person to cover business angle
• Product manager to cover product angle
• Loyal user to cover user angle
• Internal design team to cover design angle (self-reflecting)

Product intentions from 4 angle

Aside from the intentions, we also gathered several issues/ problems that they noticed alongside the product and we categorised them into groups (pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase). We collected 76 issues that covers several different themes. With affinity mapping method, we managed to get 5 main topic/ themes:

1. Safety: Show users we care for their safety during pandemic
2. Relevance: Give users relevant recommendation to speed up booking process
3. Trust: Ease users in validating their choices and gain user trust
4. Flexibility: Give users options to address their stay barriers and uncertainties
5. Accessibility: Increase visual cues, reduce cognitive load, signify useful features to improve user experience.

With grouping the issues into big themes, we were able to establish a goal/ outcome from each themes:

The themes

The new flow

The newly established flow for Hotel-booking journey

After knowing the intentions from all related stakeholders, we put together all necessary data and transformed the old flow into the new user flow. Even though we did not change the three big part (pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase), but this has brought a major change into how we see the flow. The old flow was so common to us that we didn’t realise that each steps of user flow requires different treatment. Every steps now have their own intentions and goals, and this has helped the researchers, designers, even PMs and writers to treat our product more accordingly.

For example, back then in landing page we did not have any recommendation content. All we knew was straightforwardly put search form and thought that all conversion must come from that place. After we established the new flow, we realised that during that steps users might not know yet where to go and so their biggest intention will be finding “inspirations” (in a form of contents, recommendations, blog, etc.) that can help them select their desired destinations. Moreover, we now understand that our most crucial goal is to “engage” with the users. Not to convert, not to assure, not to assist, but simply to engage. This flow has also helped us in decision making, and keeping the product and intention consistently across the product briefs and requirements.

What’s next

There are so many implementations that we can do from the newly established flow, from design improvements to deepen our foundational understanding about the product. Here’s some of the things that we did after assessing and re-making the flow:

• We mapped each themes that were explained above to each step, so that each step will have 1–2 main themes. This helped us to organise the best information architecture & priority. For example, the search result page will mainly focus on the theme relevance and accessibility so all components relating to the themes will get higher visibility (quick filter, recommendations, etc.)
• We made guidelines and socialised them across the product vertical. We currently have more than 5 PMs working in hotel product. To make sure that the product and design deliver the right intentions, we created guidelines in a form of presentation deck and made sure that everyone knows about it.
• We used the newly flow as the source of our validation. We constantly look back to the foundation as we improve the product and design to assess whether each of our design decisions/improvements have fulfilled the intentions and goals of each steps.

The power of intentions

All of the process and assessment started with the question of intentions. As the team grow bigger, we realised that this powerful tool can be really useful to improve our design process. Here’s what I personally think of the usage of intentions:

1. Intention helps us bridge a lot of objectives from different stakeholders.
2. Intention helps us to solve problems more objectively and to avoid bias.
3. Intention helps us to validate our design/ product effectiveness.
4. Intention helps us to narrow down unnecessary noises/ demands in creating better products.