UX case study
One-stop ‘shopping’ experience for hotel-booking app users
The little things that support user in making a hotel reservation
Imagine you as a traveler, deciding to take a break from work and plan a 5D4N trip to Bali, away from work, surrounded by nature, good foods, and most importantly, peace.
But wait, a delightful vacation to Bali is one thing, but planning is another thing. Let’s say you’ve booked your flight tickets, and now it’s just a matter of booking the hotel, and maybe airport transfer, and then deciding where to go, and oh, maybe booking the famous balinese spa. But what about the transportation while in Bali? Then, maybe renting a car. And the list goes on and on and on.
Starting with this idea, we imagined that we could save so much pain (and time) by combining all those processes into one, getting things done even before you board your flight.
Hotels do not simply sell rooms
The idea is simple: offering user products that support their travel experience while booking a hotel room. This feature will allow users to reserve a series of hotel facilities and services and pay for them beforehand.
When thinking about a new feature, we also have to include not only the users, but also the business providers — in this case, the hotels/ accommodations. After thorough research to several hotels, we found out that hotels also provide a wide-range services other than just selling rooms. We see this as an opportunity to create a whole new experience in hotel reservation process. Based on our user needs and best-selling products that hotel usually sells, we agree on grouping these products/ services into four add-ons groups: Meals, Room Complements, Transport, and Activities.
According to our user research, 39% of our users stay at the hotel to fulfil their social needs & seek pleasure. This contradicts from the original means of hotel reservation (to find shelter), but this speaks a lot as today’s culture in our society. We are no longer looking for a mere product but an experience within it. Without realising it, hotels also serve as social connectors, stress relievers, even tastemakers. People come to specific hotels because they offer extra services, or have particular activities/ facilities that others do not have. Price is no longer a measurement.
Defining user journey
The most important challenge in adding this feature is finding the right spot. Because the feature is just subsidiary and not mandatory, we need to put it on the phase where the user feels the most comfortable with — not too annoying but still serve its initial purpose: to sell.
After a long thinking process, we decided to put the phase after the user chooses the hotel and before the payment process. Since this step is not mandatory, users can opt to not click it and go straight to the payment process. Thus this covers both the conventional and unconventional users when booking a hotel room. For those who plan a lot, you can select additional airport transfer or book nearby activities, or for those who love impulsive buying, you can just decide later after you arrive at the destination.
Smallest things matter
Next step, what are the things that users might consider when buying add-ons. Multiple orders? Special request? or just as simple as looking at a bigger scale. We realise that most users will have concerns regarding buying additional products, that the ones who buy are the ones who plan. This type is the cautious type — details are everything to them.
Thus, we add little steps that will enhance user experience in buying add ons. On the first step, you can add the quantity of the add-ons that you would like to buy, plus adding notes to it. Then, if you want to know more about it, you can simply click on the image or the description, to see the detail. Adjusting quantity will be a matter of clicks, and to create a seamless and familiar experience, we adopted e-commerce behaviour and put it into this journey so users would naturally follow their instinct.
Final look
After several iterations and improvements, these are the final look for the add-ons feature. The adjusted version of this feature is now live at Tiket.com mobile apps. The concept of ‘one-stop shopping’ from e-commerce pretty much influenced the design. The users are guided to a mini marketplace where they can shop and add products/services that they need for their itinerary.
Pain and constrain that will lead to future improvements
We realised that a lot of improvements can be made to make this feature more user-friendly and/or enhance user experience. We also encountered a few constrains from the business angle, as it could be quite difficult to maintain consistency for this feature across properties. This issue then raised the need to educate hoteliers and hotel managers to also participate and collaborate with us to provide good content for the feature. We learned that co-creation also exists outside the product division (engineer, PM, tech) but also with the B2B perspective, etc.
For future improvements, we plan to add more advance features, that increase more personalised needs, just like choosing which date user wants to buy the add-ons for, or automated mandatory quantity that user needs to buy (for example: buy 1 time extra bed for the whole stay instead of one night). Since these improvements will take more effort and time to develop, we decided to go with the MVP version to test and iterate more in the future.
Thank you for reading! If you like the article, don’t forget to 👏🏼. All feedbacks and thoughts are welcomed in the comment section. Thoughts and all the UX processes are by yours truly while the UI explorations and interactions are by Sam (visit his dribbble: here). Read more articles by visiting my page or simply connect with me through LinkedIn here. 💁🏻
