Redesigning a Vacation App

When working with startups, UX leaders need to bring tools to differentiate, while recognizing funding constraints. With this consumer vacation site, the goal was to increase engagement and conversion. The challenge was an infrastructure that didn’t support modern interactions. Rather than deliver sub-standard designs, we helped drive business process and engineering changes required to implement each enhancement. Some of these changes included upgrading to a different back-end technology, and implementing some client-side capabilities to improve site performance and page load times. By creating a more modern and responsive site, we were able to promote user engagement, which increased demand. It also increased satisfaction for property owners, enabling us to increase the number of properties. Of course, funding constraints typically exist in startups, so many changes have had to wait.

Figure 1: Original Site Design Versus Initial Redesign

We also drove technology changes to ensure users can view and interact with key information and page attributes almost instantly after a search, while the remainder of the content on the page continues to load. In the end, our work resulted in a roadmap of capabilities and innovations that will take several releases to implement, and which leverage leading design concepts and patterns.

Among changes were a new logo, which we curated for under $1,000, a brand and design refresh, and several mechanisms for driving engagement.

Among these mechanisms for driving engagement were:

• High quality photography, which can increase engagemen by as much as 4x
• Create an inspiring design that is easy to use, and meets the deeper needs of the users booking properties.

• Support the four major intents users have when coming to such a site:

  • Find a property in a pre-determined region
  • Seek inspiration to find the right vacation destination (see the Future Home Page option later).
  • Find a way to help the Chief Household Officer make a choice of venue that everybody (across families) would love. The fact is that when choosing vacation rental homes, often more than one family travels together, and making everyone happy can be a chore.
  • Find special deals
• Enable direct booking of properties, rather than simply sending an email and waiting for a reply.
• Enable users to enter the address of a destination, and find properties in that vicinity.
• For mobile users, to identify where they are, and identify and book properties with availability for the current night.
• Create the equivalent of favorites and wish lists, so travelers can both track inspirations and share them socially.

As part of this process, we compared other sites, both direct competitors and related travel sites, to understand what they do well, and what we could do to improve the consumer site, both from a supply (property owner) and demand (traveler) perspective. We also conducted primary and secondary research to understand the personas for the site and product. In the end, we identified that by far the larger percentage of visitors was women, and specifically women who fit into the category of Chief Household Officer. That is, they are in charge of a household, and for booking vacation plans not only for their family, but often for multiple families at once.

Figure 2: Alternate Design, which Tested Worse with Female Users

It turns out that most male users preferred the white space and smaller images found in Figure 2. However, most females preferred an image that covered most, if not all of the Home page, with content over the top of the image. Thus, over time, the company intends to include even higher quality photography, and even leverage multiple images, with movement and sound, embedded within CSS. Figure 3 highlights the intended new page, though we are recommending a full-page picture.

Figure 3: Eventual New Home Page

While the current site is a significant improvement over the previous version of the site, any site—consumer or otherwise—requires constant tweaking to improve. In fact, data has shown that instituting a multivariate testing (a/b testing or bucket testing) infrastructure can help increase engagement and conversion by 500%. In the end, the Engineering team will implement such an infrastructure, but first must continue to implement “do or die” features. Such an experimentation framework is critical for consumer sites, and I look forward to working with a great group of people in this company going forward to help implement many of the enhancements that come out of our engagement.

Figure 4: Inceasing Engagement for Users Who Want to Explore the World (Initial Concept)

Comparing Search Results Pages- Old Versus New

Here is an example of the old versus the new Search Results (Geography) pages:

Figure 5: New Search Results (Geo) Pages

Comparing Property Pages- Old Versus New

Here is an example of the individual property pages from the old versus the new site:

Figure 6: Old Versus New Property Pages

Photo View Results Page

Here is an example of the new Photo view results, which shows the Information bar pinned to top of page, so that it is never lost when the user scrolls down the page:

Figure 7: Search Results Page in Photo (Card) View

Key Results

Since the redesign, the site has increased its supply of properties, and acquired another 400,000 through property management companies. In addition, based on my recommendations, they are merging with a company that has a true real-time booking engine, and a distribution API, which enables this large supply of properties to be distributed and booked on any travel site, not just this consumer site. Of course, this one consumer site functions as a reference implementation to prove the real-time booking and distribution capabilities.

This article has shown only a subset of pages for this redesign. To discuss other pages, including Wish List pages and more, reach out and let’s have a conversation.