Auditing fee transparency across Booking.com
Problem
In order to contribute to trust and safety goals for 2020, a senior director tasked my product team with exploring how to make extra fees more transparent to guests and property owners.
The main goal was to document the current state of the extra fees experience on Booking.com. Together with my UX team, I aimed to demystify the product and to provide short-, mid- and long-term recommendations for UX and product improvements.
I uncovered and refined guest, property owner and Booking.com pain points which guided our audit.
My role
Collaborated with my senior UX designer to understand and define the problem, identify pain points for all stakeholders, outline focus and objectives, and determine how we would measure the success of our project.
Aligned with stakeholders across different areas of the business, including account managers, legal, guest-facing and property owner-facing product teams in order to collect ‘clues’ about how a wide range of extra fees actually worked.
Mentored a junior UX designer on my product team in their running of an audit of the current users flows, identifying friction points and suggesting design-based improvements, and helping her to grow her skills and confidence.
Provided content recommendations, validated by UX feedback sessions, including: rewriting headers as questions, adding tooltips for confusing fields, aligning key phrases across the website and implementing a content hierarchy to guide the order of fields on the page.
The scope and relationship of extra fees placements which I mapped across home properties (like apartments), core properties (like hotels) and the guest-facing experience.
A few of my content recommendations based on the results of the audit.
Outcomes
Achieved objective of conceptualising an abstract topic and preparing clear next steps for the product team to tackle.
Created a comprehensive reference on extra fees which has been referenced by other teams for related projects.
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