Advising for planning a trip — UX Case Study
Company: Despegar • Year: 2019–2020
Despegar is one of the largest online travel agencies (OTA) in Latin America. The project took place between 2019 and 2020 as part of an initiative to improve the conversion of landing pages for booking flights.
My role in the project
I worked along side another product designer of my team. Together we covered the entire design process from understanding to ideation and validation.
How we did it
- Data analysis
- Check previous research made by other teams
- Industry benchmark
- Design
- User testing
Introduction
The problem
Despegar wasn’t offering personalized experiences for each kind of user that were visinting the site. So the experience were the same no matter if a person had all the trip already planned or if he/she was still figuring out where to go.
Goal
Our goal was to advise users when planning their trip by providing as much information as possible about the destinations to make the job of planning a trip easier and eventually Despegar would become a trustable site to check information of destinations before travel. (This was also inline with the company’s broader vision of stop being just a travel agency to start being a company focused on the experience of traveling)
Users
For this initiative we were focusing on two types of users
- Explorer: People who intends to travel, but the destination and/or dates are not yet clear, it can still be influenced. They searched in the last month but with a low search intensity.
- Researcher: The user intends to travel, and is already clear about the destination and/or the dates and/or companions. They carried out an intensive search between 10 to 6 days ago.
Analyzing the data from Google Analytics we knew that a high percentage of the users that navigated through the flight landing pages were the type explorer but with very low conversion rate (CVR). And for the researcher kind, these were a lower percentage with also low CVR.
These groups of users also belonged mostly to the segments Low and Mid, under the hypotesis that they were the ones looking to travel for the best price and best moment of the year.
Previous research
We also knew from research conducted previously by other team that people usually define their destination according to the activities they can do there, the budget and the social factor (how many people have been there, ratings, etc.)
Actual state of the solution
For the moment, the only information we had in our funnel, that we could say it was for the users to plan their trip, was a table with prices of close dates (desktop and mobile) and another one that was a bar chart with the prices of the flights for each day.
Even if the CVR was slightly better when they were interacting with this content, it wasn’t helping with the planning of the trip, but only with the budget.
We also ran an A/B test with this bar chart of prices to see how was the CVR when this information was showed upfront, and the result was a lower CVR, so the hypothesis was that this bar chart was way too complicated to understand for our users.
Competitor analysis
I started studying other leading players in the industry to see how they were assisting customers through the shopping funnel when talking about when and where to travel.
Conclusions
- Most players focus their customer assistance in price and the chepeast way to travel.
- Most common way to show better prices is showing flights within 3 days from the date the user picked.
- Some players also focus on giving information about the destiny, like how is the weather, high and low season and pictures.
With these conclusions in mind I started working in the value proposition and thinking about how the company was going to tackle user needs to solve the problem.
Ideation
During this phase I come up with several modules we could use to help users with their trip planning, aligned with the previous benchmark and the strategy defined.
The modules mentioned were the following
- Price of the flight per month
- Activities in destination
- Information about the destination and the season
- The weather during high season
- Distance from the airport(s) to the center
- Average stay recommended
- Nearby destinations at a lower price
Validation
We recruited users through a Hotjar survey in the website and we ran remote testing sessions.
The goal was to test the whole flights shopping funnel with special attention in the new flight information and the new travel advise information.
Conclusions
✅ Users interacted without problems with the princing information and understood clearly the cheaper month to travel.
✅ They saw and understood the information about the destination.
✅ Some of them explicitly mentioned that the information about the destination was very useful for them to know.
⚠️ Also some users thought it would be better if they could see the weather information for the dates they searched.
Final designs
After concluding with validation, I spent some time talking with different stakeholders, product and IT team, to align with what we saw in the user testings and what was technically possible to do, thinking in information available, time and effort.
