How understanding UX design benefits digital businesses

Learning UX design from booking.com

Hello everyone, today I will be talking about the User Experience(UX) of booking.com, one of the world’s leading digital travel agencies for lodging reservations. With more than 1,550,000 overnight stays are booked daily. Whenever users land on the platform, they will experience what they see and the quality of their experience has a critical impact on how they feel which, ultimately, creates conversions on the platform — will they do what we want them to do? Therefore, in this blog, we will see how the UX of booking.com can lead to conversions on both website and application.

When we analyze the UX of the website, we need to look at the Information Architecture(IA), which tells us how they arrange the contents in their platform. For example, on the desktop view of the booking.com landing page, the navigation of the main menu bar and quick booking section is on the top, followed by early deals, browse by property type, subscription box, search by states, recommended hotels, sign in to get discounts, connect with other travelers, trending spaces, recommended destination, and subscription box, respectively.

While on the app view, it is a bit simpler with the menu bar, quick booking section, early deals, community section, and subscription box.

In my opinion, It is easy to navigate, which is beneficial for customers. Moreover, all of these elements have their purposes for customers, mainly to let them book the hotel and subscribe to the website, explore more deals, join the community, or even list their property on this platform. As we click to search for booking, it will land us on another landing page where we can see more details of the choices of hotels.

We will see the essential details of each property available for our destination on this landing page, such as name, location, rating, and price. On the above, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) of this website also recommends alternative dates for customers to get a better deal if they are flexible.

Furthermore, the company also provides us the filter bar on the left side to filter the price range, rating of the hotel, bed preference, review score, amenities, etc. This facilitates us to find the place we are looking for easier, generating conversions. In addition, it is a responsive design that allows the website to adapt across various devices users are viewing it on, such as a mobile, desktop, tablet, etc.

The website’s aesthetics also reflect the brand personality with the tone of colors — blue, which is associated with trust and loyalty, and orange, which is related to adventure and affordability. If we apply the concept of fascination advantage from the last blog post, this website would have the advantage of passion — from the contents and information provided for customers to be prepared for their journey, and trust — the mood and tone on the website which conveys customers to the reliability of the information and ensures that they will get the best deals from booking.com.

So, I think booking.com did a good job of designing the platform for the purpose of User Experience in order to generate more conversions.