To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Booking.com.
Brief:
Design a product and/or service that improves the check-in experience at vacation rentals for both guests and property owners.
Context:
In addition to hotels, Booking.com also features vacation rental properties. Unlike hotels, vacation rentals rarely have 24-hour front desks and this can make it challenging for customers to “check-in” at the properties they have booked.
Guests often have to coordinate their arrival times with property owners (so that someone is there to meet them with the keys), pick up the keys from an alternative location (that might be far from the property) or hunt for the keys in a hidden “secret location” chosen by the host.
My Role:
For this project, I acted as product manager and design sprint facilitator.
I also kickstarted the project by pitching the idea and negotiating resources and priorities with senior management to make it happen.
Design Sprint:
I assembled a team of designers, product leaders and subject matter experts and guided them through a multi-day design sprint.
To keep the team focussed, I organized the sprint at an offsite location: a vacation rental reserved on Booking.com. The apartment gave the team a spacious, comfortable environment to work in but also gave us a chance to “eat our own dog-food” and experience the product the way our customers do.
Prototyping:
The team produced landing page mockups for the most promising concepts developed during the sprint.
Since the ideas were fairly complex to implement, the goal was to validate the concepts with limited investment before fully committing resources to the project.
Validation:
The validation process was divided into two phases – qualitative and quantitative.
In the first phase, we requested feedback on the landing page mockups during interviews with potential users. We refined the concepts based on the feedback provided and produced a new set of landing pages that reflected real user insights.
Next, we concept-tested the landing pages in a survey targeting potential users, which enabled the team to get a quantitative measure of user interest and an early sense of product-market fit.