A quick attempt to create a sense of urgency while booking a hotel through the “Treebo” mobile app: A Case Study
This short case study focusing on the “Treebo” mobile app is an outcome of a 48 Hour long Design Challenge which I was a part of along with my groupmates, managing members and our mentor Mr. Anudeep Ayyagari. I would like to sincerely thank them all for the support provided by all of them. Without going in detail about each and every step of the design challenge, I would focus upon the final outcome and how it matters to me as a person who has recently started out on the path of UI/UX.
TL;DR: Here are the links to the finished product:
1) Product
Founded in 2015, Treebo is a new age hotel brand offering comfortable stays at budget prices.
Treebo derives its name from “Bo Tree”, the fig tree under which Gautam Buddha attained enlightenment. The fig tree family — Banyan, Peepul among others — has inspired not just the company’s name but also what they do. They aspire to emulate the vast reach of the fig trees.
Treebo Hotels is an Indian budget hotel chain that operates on franchising. As of January 2020, Treebo Hotel has over 600 hotels in 113 cities in India
Source: startuptalky.com
2) Problem Statement
“To Create a sense of urgency while making a booking through the mobile app”
Core Idea: The Urgent Booking feature aims to create a sense of urgency for travelers making last-minute bookings by highlighting available rooms that can be booked immediately and clearly communicating the limited availability of these rooms. Thus a premium can be charged seeing a high demand of rooms. To make this happen several changes have to be made within the flow of the complete room booking process.
3) Assumptions
● Travelers making last-minute bookings value the ability to book a room quickly and that the Urgent Booking feature will be able to effectively communicate the limited availability of these rooms.
● Travelers are open to pay premiums on making an urgent booking.
● Feature will not negatively impact the user experience.
● The feature will not impact the existing available resources.
● Follows all the laws and regulations.
4) Constraints
● Constraints to timely communicate the availability of rooms.
● Ability to integrate the feature with existing booking systems.
5) Business Metrics Targeted
● Revenue: The goal is to create a sense of urgency within the users’ mind so that they would make quicker decisions of booking the hotel rooms and services which would ultimately lead to revenue growth.
● Customer Satisfaction: The quick updates about the limited availability of rooms would prompt the user to make the bookings within time to avoid any last moment trouble. This would help the business to gain trust of the user as they would be satisfied with the service.
6) Secondary Research (Desk Research)
As a part of the research for this challenge, I studied how various other brands are creating a sense of urgency within users’ mind.
I got many valuable insights and the successful ways by which these brands are successfully tapping user attention and making them feel like this task is priority and must be completed asap. Upon taking inspiration from them, I was able to figure out what Treebo lacks and what to add to it.
7) Flow within the app
The flow selected was from the point when a user selects the location and now they are on the step where they have to select to dates. The flow ends at the check out page, also including the notification if someone exits the app from the checkout page.
8) Low-Fidelity(Hand Drawn) Wireframing
After the research was done, I tried to create a rough wireframe of how the feature that I had in mind would look like.
8) Product Design and Prototyping
After wireframing I was pretty clear what I have to design and how I have to do it. After taking in consideration the existing fonts and design of the app, I tried my best to respect the consistency of the app. The design is done focusing on the android OS.
Here are the pictures of how the final output would look in comparison to the existing one:
Screen 1: Small red dots were introduced on the page where the user select the check in and check out dates. The dots are added under specific dates, notifying a user that rooms on these dates are in high demand and they must hurry to get their rooms booked. The significance of the red dot is given on the top right corner.
Screen 2: All hotels were separated into different cards and “Book Now” button was added which would take the user directly to checkout page. If the user taps on the card it would take him to the details page. Low room numbers marked in red with a “High Demand” sticker to emphasize the urgency to limited rooms left. A ticker at the bottom which shows a discount coupon which has a expiry timer.
Screen 3: Here also a user can see limited room availability in red to attract the attention. With that an “Amount freeze feature” is added which aims to create awareness in user’s mind that the rooms are limited and their prices depend on the availability. The prices can increase and they can pay a given amount to freeze the total amount they see today for a given number of days.
Screen 4: The checkout page has a coupon already applied with the timer ON. This would make it feel urgent and that too with the timer duration written in red with a prompting text to add to it. This is the same coupon that was shown in the ticker in screen 2.
Apart from that, the “Pay Now” button is highlighted with Up to 5% Off written to not only act as a focal point for the user, but also to lure the user with a discount so that they make the purchase now only.
Screen 5: This screen shows the notification is sent to a user if they abandon the cart and lures them with an added discount and that too with a timer to lure them to make the booking asap.
Links:
● Figma File : https://www.figma.com/file/L3r4bWqHMR7FwnJafjlg3B/Untitled?node-id=62%3A39
9) Usability Testing
The above screens are the final product which has corrections done after the usability testing.
The concerns that users reported during the testing were:
● Increase the size of “Filling Fast” — Done.
● The text “Filling Fast” is confusing — Done (Changed to “Rooms Filling Fast).
● “Only 3 rooms left can be emphasized more” — Done (Exclamation mark added and colour changed).
● Animation on “High Demand” sticker. — Pending.
● Not able to understand “Freeze the price” feature properly — Done (Text above the Pay button made more understandable).
10) Summary and conclusion
This project gave me and my team members an opportunity to delve into how the travel based services like Treebo make way for users to book their rooms in a convenient way and how the same companies also manipulate a user to buy things at higher prices or upselling or cross selling additional things just by understanding the psychology of the user. All this gave me a very clear picture of how a very small additions to an existing service not only prove beneficial for the user who is able to make urgent bookings, but also for the businesses which are able to generate revenue out of these features. So next time you make a booking through any of such apps, do not forget some great minds are working tirelessly to provide you a seamless experience.
With this I conclude this Case Study.
Thankyou for taking out time to read this 🙏.
You can connect with me on:
●LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanyabatra/
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