Have a project you’d like to collaborate on? Get in touch at dan@dan-marston.co.uk
© Dan Marston 2024
Helping customers find their perfect hotel
Feedback and previous testing had shown that users in the UK, Netherlands and Belgian markets were unaware of our brands and what they offered. The UX team saw this as an opportunity to use the design sprint process to answer how might we promote our branded hotels better online. The sprint team was gathered in London from across the business with extra representation from the German and Nordic markets.
The team collectively began to outline the problem in more detail, defining our long term goals for the project. We mapped out our challenge and had an afternoon of interviewing experts within the business. This helped us choose our target and define our "How Might We..." statements for the week:
We individually sketched our solutions, and voted. Afterwards a single storyboarded concept was created for a tool that matched user needs for a holiday to a branded hotel result.
It starts by asking the user a few questions, and then presents them with personalised search results, mapping branded hotels as well as non-branded hotels to their choices.To promote these hotels we used bigger cards and highlighted three USPs, which would reflect the users preferences.
A smaller team consisting of myself, a UX designer, an optimisation analyst and UX researcher built the proof of concept prototype on day 4 and tested this in an in-house research lab on day 5. This was about getting some early feedback from target customers, so we could see if our concept made sense, what aspects of this worked well and what needed to be improved.
The concept seemed to be well received; funnelling by choices, the bigger brand cards and the USP bullets were all positive aspects.
While participants found the process to be quick, after going through it they said that they’d want to choose rough dates at the start, so the results were more relevant.
On the search results page, participants were more drawn to tap on the bigger cards, as they were more prominent and had more detail, even though they didn’t realise they were branded.
Based on our previous testing insights we wanted to iterate the concept and test again as soon as possible. Four options were presented first instead of two; Family, Group, Couple and Solo. We hoped to provide more relevant subsequent choices based on the type of traveller.
For families we also asked ‘What do the kids enjoy doing’ and ‘What do the adults enjoy doing’. This was due to feedback that it was important to have things for the adults to do while the kids were occupied. Other steps were added to ask where they are travelling from, roughly when they wanted to travel, and the option to pick a destination region using a map.
Changes to the branded hotel page included making the branded USPs clearer and more visual, while also providing more information about the brand at the bottom of the page.A higher fidelity prototype was produced as the grey imagery negatively distracted some participants in the previous round.
Overall the second round saw more positive responses to the changes made, and users felt that their holiday needs were well represented in the branded search results they saw. With the concept a success with research participants and internal stakeholders, it allowed us to prove the value of the design sprint process to a wide audience.
Many of the features found within the prototype were taken away separately and implemented into the journey to provide quick wins.
Tests were implemented to allow users to search by feature, and USPs were shown within the branded search results. Brand information was positioned on the hotel page, and certain UI tweaks were carried over into the free text search and package search journeys, including the branded logo on the cards. These changes contributed to an increase in the share of our branded hotels being booked.
Have a project you’d like to collaborate on? Get in touch at dan@dan-marston.co.uk