Quest Apartment Hotel is looking to redesign their website with the focus of the most crucial aspect of the website - the booking flow and experience. From analytics, we know that during peak times, the responsiveness of these pages drop and we see a significant increase in bounce rate.
The property pages had to be rebuild and mirror current page layout, content and style guide. There were also inconsistency in content as a majority of Quest properties were managed by different property owners. 50% of their users are also accessing their website on their mobile so we have to design this booking experience from a mobile-first approach.
To kick off, we facilitated a co-design session with the stakeholders to discuss and determine our plan of attack. As there was no budget allocated for user research, we utilised this session to workshop with the stakeholders to really understand who their core users were, where they were coming from and how they were navigating the website.
Prior to the session, we did also looked at other similar booking flows and features to find out if there are any gaps in the market. It was really useful to print these out as the stakeholders can mark up what they like and make annotations on the print out.
Some of the insights we gathered from our co-design session were:
We concluded that there were two key themes that we will be focusing on in the booking experience for the guests:
We also did an analytics review to determine the key journeys of the users on their current website and mapped out their user flow:
Keeping personalisation and simplification at the core focus of the booking experience redesign, we started putting together a clickable prototype to present our design concepts to Quest.
Having looked at the other booking experiences, guests are typically presented with a number of questions before they start their booking journey - eg. who they're travelling with, when and where are they going, do they have a discount code etc. We wanted to simplify and begin their booking experience by simply asking one key question which is the most important question - Where are you travelling to?
By answering a series of questions, guests will be able to narrow down their search results to only show properties that are relevant to the information they've provided.
In our new design, we've allowed users to select the type of traveller they are travelling as. We've also preselected the number of adults/children based on the common traveller group types (Eg. the average family size in Australia consist of 2 adults and 2 children)
By making clear delineation on the types of travellers, Quest will be able to have greater visibility on who their guests are. This information is extremely valuable to them moving forward in making business decisions and creating better marketing campaigns.
Users typically consume information in 2 formats - card and list view. In the card view, guests will now see properties that are relevant to the type of traveller they are. Eg. if the guest is coming with family, they'll see properties that are family-friendly, has 2 bedroom apartment options etc.
In the map view, the key information here is proximity. Guests will now be able to see the properties closest to their search destination and view a quick summary of the property directly from the map.
To simplify the guests booking experience, we've also added a book now button which will allow the guest to navigate directly to the booking pages without viewing the hotel overview pages. If they needed more information, they can view more information on the property over pages.
There's currently a lot of content on the Quest overview pages. We have simplified the information to show relevant information to the guests. Right at the top, guest will be able to see personalised information depending on the type of traveller they are.
Eg. If they are a family traveller type, they'll see information such as the nearest Park, Convenient Store and Airport. If they were travelling as a business or solo, they'll see information such as the nearest car hire, cafe or beach.
We are also able to generate a set of these icons that will allow the property owners to select those applicable to their locality.
We also simplified their booking decisions by preselecting the best room type and best booking rate depending on the traveller type. Our goal is to help the guests make the best decisions without them having to go over the different types of rooms and rates which can be confusing to them.
Finally, guests will also get 10% off their booking rates if they are members. We added an additional screen for guests who are not logged in to remind to prompt them to sign up to the membership.
The new booking experience is now live on the website and is optimised for the mobile.