Overview
Booking.com, the world’s largest online hotel booking website, were looking for post-booking ideas to increase their customer loyalty by implementing new features in the app. The goal of this UX research was to generate feasible and user-friendly app ideas through investigating the customer journey.
In order to get deeper insights, we actually played the the role of the real customers of Booking.com, visiting foreign cities and staying at the hotels for one night. By carefully mapping the whole process, several ideas were thought up and the strategy of executing these ideas was formed.
Time
10/2013
Role
Sole designer and researcher
1. Define the journey
To systematically structure the thinking pattern, different phases of the whole journey from one booking to the next booking were firstly defined in a cycle. Our focus, the Post-booking part, is what happens after a user book a hotel online, which can be divided into four phases: 1. Pre-visit; 2. During-visit; 3. Post-visit; and back to 4. Travel idea.
2. Role-playing
To make sure the journey will be thoroughly covered, two roles were defined: 1. the backpacker; 2. the businesswoman. Each role have different purposes for the trip and thus their needs and behaviors are different.
3. Mapping
During the actual trip, we tried to make all the decisions from the role’s mindset and recorded their emotional changes on all the touchpoints over time. The emotional turning points, especially the unsatisfied ones, are where the service can be improved, namely, where the opportunities lie.
