Role:
Product Design Consultant - Interim Head of Design
Contributions:
Core Team:
Matthew Davey - Chief Product Officer
Nikola B. - Lead Engineer
Peter F. - Engineer
Sander Eentalu - Chief Tech. Officer
Client
background
Holiday Swap Group is a home swapping service that has grown and evolved into a full home-booking platform that caters to a global community of travelers, in only six years (similar to AirBnB).
Challenge
& solution
As Holiday Swap (HS) expanded, they realized that their offering of tools for hosts either non-existent or subpar. HS responded by developing advanced tools and features, essential for retaining their current users and attracting new ones, while preserving their competitive edge in the industry.
We redefined holiday swaps business strategy by marrying HS business and HS hosts needs. This led us to introduce a list of features and experiences that are geared to empower Hosts to hit their goals. This led to a boost in home listings and the overall advocacy for hosting on HS. First up on the list, was the new home listing flow and it’s sub-features.
Reduction of home listing drop rates, within the first two months since new flow and features were launched.
Increase of re-lists from existing hosts, as they found the new features very helpful.
Overall net new hosts list a home on to the platform.
Of hosts found the save drafts feature convenient, and went back to finish their listing uploads.
I used two main research tactics to better understand HS hosts and get to the bottom of why they were dropping off during the home listing flow. First, I created and sent out a survey to discover why users were feeling discouraged. After the surveys were in, I followed up with users of interest, conducting interviews and walking them through the current flows and documented their experiences.
I created an initial flow that had everything the business needed to collect from users in order to build out their listing. Implementing user-centric thinking, best practices, and everything I learned in our research, I re-imagined the overall information architecture and design patterns that would be presented to the users during their time engaging with the home listing flow.
We saw immediate improvement with users who tested the new experience flow, yet we were still not reaching the range of success that we were striving for. Users were pleased with the how intuitive the experience felt, but still felt it was very long and mentioned they would possibly save their progress and return at a later date. This caused concern as some of the users that tested our new experience were already hosts with our competitors.
The old experience:
Following successful trends that I saw across other experiences, I created an easy way for users to upload multiple images into the experience.
To adhere to some technical restraints we had home listers upload only 6 images at first, but while working with the engineers, we were able create a quick patch that allowed users to upload as many images as they liked afterwards.
The new image uploading improvements favored well with the current home listers in the HS community who tested the new flow.
Collaborating closely with the Chief Product Officer and our engineers, we ideated and executed a way for hosts that had their homes already listed else where, to easily bring them into the Holiday Swap platform.
Users just simply use their log in credentials from third party platforms to access their listings database and select the listings they would like to upload onto the HS platform.
We simplified the listing process for hosts even further by introducing a system that uses description indicators to help draft their listing overviews. These generated listing overviews can be used as provided or edited as desired.
To bring this feature to life, we integrated ChatGPT, which significantly enhanced the listing creation process. During user testing, hosts were so impressed with this new tool that we prioritized its rollout in our development map.
Want to
work together?
I’m available to consult, freelance and even open to new full-time opportunities. If you think we can partner up and create something great, shoot me an email.
Contact me
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