Priceline
Recent Activity Design
0-1 product design & design leadership
Working across my product teams, I found that users were visiting our site an average of three times prior to actually booking their trip. We had been retaining a user’s recent searches, but we weren’t doing nearly enough to retain and resurface a user’s recent activity. Identifying this gap, I designed a set of features to meet this user need and allow users to easily dive back into their trip booking and planning with a seamless, personalized experience.
What was so interesting about this project was how many product paths it touches, requiring true collaboration and clear and consistent communication. I worked across teams, producing the majority of the designs myself while also leading and managing the design outputs from other designers. I ran multiple alignment and strategy sessions, conducted competitor auditing, ran multiple rounds of user testing, and devised a new system for design feature ownership.
Priceline is an online travel agency with a mission to be the best travel dealmakers in the world. For this project, I led the 0-1 design of this feature set.
Role
Lead Product Design
Design Manager at Priceline
Skills Utilized
Competitor auditing
0-1 product design thinking
Cross-functional collaboration
User research and testing
Iterative design for A/B testing
Design leadership
Project Highlight
+22%
Engagement rate
Pick up Where You Left Off
I worked closely with PMs across the homepage, account and post booking teams to devise a design solution for users to easily dive back into their travel planning. As a first step, I designed a pick up where you left off section that would live on the homepage, be stored in a user’s account, and display in segments in the user’s post booking experience.
A first iteration example below:
Finding a Home for Recent Activity
Closely coupled with the pick up where you left off feature set, I identified via user testing that user’s expected to see their recent activity housed in their account. Working within the technical constraints of our site’s architecture, I added recent activity as a section within the user’s My Trips section, an intuitive placement validated via user research and A/B testing.
Grouping Activity Types
As I progressed in designing this feature set, I found more and more opportunities for further personalization. One such example was with upcoming trips– working closely with a team of PMs and developers, we devised a solution where we could couple a user’s recent activity in the same date range as their upcoming trip. I designed a grouped display that allowed us to show both the upcoming trip and the related recent activity on the homepage.
Component Design
Designing for recent activity, I had to design a set of new components. This included updating our recent search component, designing a new container for the new pick up where you left off section of the homepage, designing an “abandoned at checkout” card for use throughout the site, and designing a handful of related cross-sell components.
What is “Recent Activity”?
Working closely with a team of PMs and Developers across the homepage, account and post booking paths, we found that when we were collaborating with other teams on this initiative, it was difficult to align and took a while for everyone to get on the same page. Working closely with the design team I managed, I led the creation of a “knowledge hub” format that we utilized to capture the definition, reasoning, and progress of this initiative.
Auditing and User Testing
To validate design directions and ensure we were on the right path, throughout this initiative I worked closely with our research team to both individually conduct and ask for larger studies to be run around this initiative.
I’m particularly proud of the recent activity competitor audit I ran and compiled. Via this audit, I identified a number of feature gaps we needed to address and, from my findings and recommendations, we were able to prioritize fixing these gaps in future roadmaps.
What’s Next…
There’s so much more to continue to iterate on for this initiative; there’s opportunity for further personalization, additional touch points, and even more robust planning integrations.
Measuring Success
The introduction and continued iteration and improvement of these features has lead to an increase in engagement, faster booking rates, and has even spurred the creation of other new features. A few highlights include:
+22%
Engagement Rate
for homepage placements
+63
Net Incremental Bookings per Day
for homepage placements
+$802
Net Incremental Contribution per Day
for homepage placements
+36%
Event Booker Conversion
for homepage placements