PARENT/CHILD ROOM GROUPINGS CASE STUDY
The problem with endless scrolling
At Rocket Travel, we specialized in a white label product, building customized booking platforms for our many enterprise-level partners and their customers. Our team optimized all aspects of the user’s journey— from the Search results page to post booking for the hotels, flights, rental cars and activities verticals of our business.
Our hotels details page was an infinite list of duplicate room offerings, giving a pretty bad experience across our earn and redemption funnels. Our objective was to optimize room selection, reducing scroll and decision fatigue to generate more bookings and increase conversion. The outcome was a scalable and responsive design that reduced friction and got users to checkout faster.
To keep this case study succinct, I will focus on the enhancements we made for earn, where we saw a positive impact later on.
ROLE
Experience Designer
PROCESS
Discovery, Usability Testing, User Interviews, Ideation, A/B Testing, UX Design
DELIVERABLES
Wireframes, Clickable Prototypes, Hi-Fi Designs
IMPACT
📈 1.59% increase in overall Conversion
📈 2.6% lift in Total True Margin across multiple white label partners
DURATION
2022-2024
STATUS
Live
Lets start at the beginning
The Hotels team and I understood that the room selection experience on the hotel details page seriously needed to change. Most would agree that landing on a page with endless, duplicate offerings that force you to scroll to infinity is nothing short of painful and will certainly deter users from proceeding any further.
CHALLENGE
It's difficult to compare rooms, and there appear to be a lot of duplicate rooms.
HYPOTHESIS
By organizing and grouping rooms by type, we can make it easier for customers to select a room and increase conversion.
DESIGN SOLUTION
I optimized the room cards to have more distinction as ‘parent' room types with nested ‘children’ rooms within, and eased the burden of endless scrolling with pagination.
*Some comments we received from users I interviewed
DOOM SCROLLING EXPERIENCE 👎🏽
desktop & mobile hotel cards
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Discovery & analysis
I needed to see how other OTAs approached presenting room offerings, so I took a look at other competitors. All of these sites were different, but had some common patterns: they all had distinct room categories and did a decent job at consolidating a lot of important information on the room cards, making them easy to scan.
Design treatments
A FIRST PASS
After studying other examples and seeing how Agoda, our parent company, solved for this problem, I attempted a first pass at how this could work. With this iteration, I wanted to focus first on solving for the duplicate rooms and infinite scrolling, so the groupings started to take shape with child rooms getting categorized under parent room types. The goal was to iron out the experience, and this felt like a good first step before talking to users.
User impressions & insights
The next phase of this work was to conduct interviews. I recruited a handful of people, ranging from experienced, frequent travelers to those who rarely travel at all. I asked them about what they value and prioritize most when booking travel, their likes and dislikes when it comes to booking a room, and their initial impressions on our new room groupings compared to others.
*Complete user impressions linked here
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How can we push this further?
User insights helped identify additional considerations to implement:
• emphasize room imagery in a better way
• show a variety in imagery
• have larger images on mobile view
• call more attention to Free cancellation
• be consistent and transparent with price differences (free cancellation, breakfast included, etc.)
• optimize space on mobile
• implement pagination
• show a variety in imagery
• have larger images on mobile view
• call more attention to Free cancellation
• be consistent and transparent with price differences (free cancellation, breakfast included, etc.)
• optimize space on mobile
• implement pagination
Design treatments
NEW ENHANCEMENTS
After multiple rounds of internal review addressing usability and feasibility with product, engineers and fellow designers, I landed on enhancements we felt aligned with the insights users had shared.
Here's what's changed 👇🏽
IMAGES & CAROUSELS
Users indicated a desire for larger imagery and image variety, as they needed tasteful visuals to help inform their booking decisions.
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CARD DETAILS
Free cancellation is a big motivator for a lot of users, so I felt it was important to make it stand out more. We also opted to implement a callout for inclusive guest pricing and refundable deadlines for applicable rooms.
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MOBILE GROUPINGS
The previous mobile iterations had 2 child rooms per parent room type, taking up a lot of space.
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ROOM DETAILS MODAL
Many users prioritize viewing the room details modal to inform their decision. Whereas the previous modal provided imagery and a list of features, I assessed implementing the same enhancements would make using it more valuable.
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Testing
We launched a test at 50% on our own platform, Rocketmiles, launching on our remaining partner sites shortly after. Within a few weeks, we were thrilled to see the new variant won against the control! 🎉
Since earn performed well, we kept the groupings live on Rocketmiles. For our other partners with both earn and burn, we turned off the experiment with the intention to introduce new enhancements over time.
Since earn performed well, we kept the groupings live on Rocketmiles. For our other partners with both earn and burn, we turned off the experiment with the intention to introduce new enhancements over time.
Iterations implemented over time
• new image treatment on desktop ✅
• inclusive guest pricing ✅
• updated Free cancellation chip ✅
• refundable deadline for applicable rooms ✅
• new price-based rewards vs room-based rewards ✅
• external bounding box removed ✅
• inclusive guest pricing ✅
• updated Free cancellation chip ✅
• refundable deadline for applicable rooms ✅
• new price-based rewards vs room-based rewards ✅
• external bounding box removed ✅
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Final shipped experience
As seen on our partner sites like American Airlines,
Lifemiles, Enrich, Miles & More, Emirates, ConnectMiles and many more.
Pictured: live on www.rocketmiles.com
Lifemiles, Enrich, Miles & More, Emirates, ConnectMiles and many more.
Pictured: live on www.rocketmiles.com
Measuring results
The previous room selection experience was less than ideal, and we hoped that by improving the UX, we’d make the process easier and direct users to checkout much faster.
By implementing room groupings, conversion increased by 1.59% across all white label partners we tested on. Customers also booked more expensive rooms and tacked on extras to their purchase, resulting in a 2.61% lift in Total True Margin, earning an average of $572 in Incremental Margin Per Day 📈.
By implementing room groupings, conversion increased by 1.59% across all white label partners we tested on. Customers also booked more expensive rooms and tacked on extras to their purchase, resulting in a 2.61% lift in Total True Margin, earning an average of $572 in Incremental Margin Per Day 📈.
Key takeaways
Rather than simply executing on design solutions from product, this was an excellent opportunity to really showcase the importance of direct user feedback to inform the improved design of our site.
Additionally, as an organization without a research team at the time, design often conducted their own, so this was a good way for me to actually speak to users and gather valuable insights.
This was also my first time leading a larger project with the support of another designer and a team, so I learned a lot and got to apply these learnings to yield successful results.
Additionally, as an organization without a research team at the time, design often conducted their own, so this was a good way for me to actually speak to users and gather valuable insights.
This was also my first time leading a larger project with the support of another designer and a team, so I learned a lot and got to apply these learnings to yield successful results.
