Redesigning the Indian hotel booking experience
Guerilla testing OYO Rooms’ app experience and redesigning it.
ROLE
Product Designer
TOOLS
Sketch
OYO is a great way to discover and book budget hotels in India. But I run into problems every now and then when I use their mobile app. I was curious whether other users faced similar problems, so I decided to put my UX hat on and interview people regarding their experience. Quick usability testing revealed some pain points in the mobile app. In this UX case study, I try to design solutions around these problems and validate them with some additional usability tests.
Following IDEO’s design principles, I divided my work process into 5 different stages.
1. Empathize: Creating personas and job stories. Usability testing of job stories.
2. Define: Affinity mapping of pain points.
3. Ideate: Hypothesizing solutions for the pain points and sketching Lo-Fi prototypes.
4. Prototype: Creating Hi-Fi mockups and a clickable prototype.
5. Validate: Testing clickable prototypes to confirm hypotheses.
2. Define: Affinity mapping of pain points.
3. Ideate: Hypothesizing solutions for the pain points and sketching Lo-Fi prototypes.
4. Prototype: Creating Hi-Fi mockups and a clickable prototype.
5. Validate: Testing clickable prototypes to confirm hypotheses.
Background
Design Process
After researching online and talking to friends who had booked an OYO before, I made two provisional personas. These personas serve to inform my design decisions during my initial phase of research and design.
Based on Alan Klement’s concept of Jobs to be done framework, I thought about different contexts in which a user would use the OYO app. This would help me understand users’ behaviour, motivation and what outcome they expect from the service.
After better understanding the customer base, I set out to conduct guerilla usability tests at Mall of India and interviewed seven people.
This was the task that I had users complete:
1. Imagine you are travelling to a {random city} from 10 July to 13 July. You saw an advert about this hotel booking app called OYO earlier the day. How would you get about booking a place to stay with this app?
2. You don’t have your credit card right now. You decide to save the hotels you like so you can get back to them later. How would you do that?
3. You booked a room, but you realize that it’s far from the airport and you do not want the room anymore. Can you show me how you would fix this?
I recorded their screens while they were interacting the app. After the users completed the task, I noted down their demographics.
If you work at OYO and want the raw data and video footages, holler at me on facebook. Happy to help!
This was the task that I had users complete:
1. Imagine you are travelling to a {random city} from 10 July to 13 July. You saw an advert about this hotel booking app called OYO earlier the day. How would you get about booking a place to stay with this app?
2. You don’t have your credit card right now. You decide to save the hotels you like so you can get back to them later. How would you do that?
3. You booked a room, but you realize that it’s far from the airport and you do not want the room anymore. Can you show me how you would fix this?
I recorded their screens while they were interacting the app. After the users completed the task, I noted down their demographics.
If you work at OYO and want the raw data and video footages, holler at me on facebook. Happy to help!
After I had ample data to work on, I started analyzing the recordings. I jotted down all the problems that I noticed on sticky notes. I also noted all the questions that people were asking while completing the task. Next, I grouped all my insights to create a affinity map. Different colours represent different users while different groups represent different tasks. Notes stacked on each other imply multiple users experiencing the same problem. A question at the end indicates a question, not a pain point.
In order to prioritize which issues to tackle, I jotted down the problems on a 2x2 matrix with the x-axis charting importance to the user and y-axis charting importance to OYO. Assuming decreasing the dropping off across the funnel was the most important
After affinity mapping, I decided to tackle all the pain points that were either most important to the user or OYO.
While searching for hotels, 5/5 users would forgot to set their check-in and check-out date and start browsing hotels. On the final booking page, they would realize that the dates were wrong and start over.
While filtering for hotels, number of available rooms would diminish to zero on some locations. when using filters.
People booking these rooms prefer to have certain resources available during their stay such as AC, Wi-Fi, etc. and it is beneficial to provide a filter to select hotels providing these services. But almost every user experienced number of sorted hotels reducing down to zero when applying three or more of these filters, which reduced the efficiency of the booking process. Users eventually gave up and looked for hotels with these services manually.
People booking these rooms prefer to have certain resources available during their stay such as AC, Wi-Fi, etc. and it is beneficial to provide a filter to select hotels providing these services. But almost every user experienced number of sorted hotels reducing down to zero when applying three or more of these filters, which reduced the efficiency of the booking process. Users eventually gave up and looked for hotels with these services manually.
5/5 users stated distance to airport an important factor in choosing a hotel. 3/5 launched Google Maps to look up how far the hotel was from the nearest airport.
After finding what most users were struggling with, it was time to create some basic lo-fi sketches focusing on how I would like to solve the problems. Once the sketches were complete, I validated these sketches with some users and narrowed down on the potential solutions. I received some good insights and incorporated them into the final design.
Before: This had to be clicked for opening the calendar and to set dates. This step was often ignored because people directly started browsing the hotels.
After: Moved the calendar so that it appears right after the user selects a city. This way the users set dates even before they start browsing rooms.
After: Moved the calendar so that it appears right after the user selects a city. This way the users set dates even before they start browsing rooms.
Before: Earlier, there was no way to check the number of rooms available for the selected filters
After: Users are able to view the number of rooms for the selected filters. Shifted the reset filter button to the top. Filter counter removed.
After: Users are able to view the number of rooms for the selected filters. Shifted the reset filter button to the top. Filter counter removed.
Addressing Pain Point #2
After crafting solutions to the pain points users were facing, it was time to validate them with a different set of users. I talked to 5 additional users and noted down their user flow. Contrary to my belief, users were still struggling with finding nearby places on the map.
People got the general idea of the ‘nearby’ places and were able to scroll the list to lookup places. Once they found the place they were looking for, they tapped on the place waiting for something to happen. People wanted the map to provide directions in addition to the distance between the hotel and the airport. I decided to make the list items clickable.
People got the general idea of the ‘nearby’ places and were able to scroll the list to lookup places. Once they found the place they were looking for, they tapped on the place waiting for something to happen. People wanted the map to provide directions in addition to the distance between the hotel and the airport. I decided to make the list items clickable.
Validation and Iteration
Almost every user missed setting the date and started browsing hotels. This was not a particularly bad thing since you can change the dates after selecting a hotel. But most of the time users didn’t realize this and would go back a step to set dates
Personas
Job Stories
Guerilla Usability Testing
Affinity Mapping
2x2 ANALYSIS
Defining Pain Points
Pain Point #1: Setting Dates
Pain Point #2: Filtering Hotels
Pain Point #3: Viewing hotel’s distance from the airport
Ideating Solutions
Prototyping Solutions
Addressing Pain Point #1