INCREASING HOSTS ENGAGEMENT

What makes or breaks a good experience for customers in an online travel booking platform such as Agoda largely depends on the interaction of suppliers with the system.

Ongoing tasks like making sure that availability and prices are up to date or that content such as photos is relevant and updated are crucial for the success of a property to get bookings.

While this is obvious and become a standard for hotel suppliers, when Agoda decided to enter the non-hotels accommodations market due to increase in demand, we had to find ways to educate and encourage hosts users to actively interact with the system as much as hotels do.

However we could not just offer the exact same tools hoteliers are using to hosts because they had much simpler needs to manage their properties than the professionally managed hotels.

Define

THE TASK

In this project I’ve been tasked to design a dashboard that will present needed information for hosts to make better decisions and prioritize their ongoing tasks.

The goal was to present the information as clearly as possible with specific action items that could improve hosts chances for getting bookings.

My role was to define the areas of information on the screen, finding ways to drive engagement from our hosts users, and making sure the flows for each actionable items were optimized to accommodate users needs in the most efficient, meaningful and usable way.

Discover

CHALLENGES

With plenty of things we could include in this screen, our two main challenge were:

1. To design the information architecture -  which items are most necessary for the majority of users? How do we organize those without overwhelming the users?
2. To drive hosts for engagement - how do we motivate hosts to follow recommended actions suggested from the system?

The real challenge in designing for mobile applications is which and how much information should be exposed to the users.

Develop

SOLUTIONS

Based on conducted research and interviews with all types of hosts user, we realized that data and actionable items for hosts could be divided into three main sections:

• Things that related to my profile as a host
• Things that are related to all my properties
• Things that are related to specific properties

With this is in mind, we then began to think about the actual information that each section should include, and how to make sure that most of the things are covered and visible for hosts.

By discovering users needs and pain points within specific contexts we can design useful and useable applications.

Design

RESULTS

With a new overview screen that summarized and prioritized hosts’ actions, we were able to increase hosts engagement by eliminating many of the decisions and automating tasks hosts are expected to take to provide the best experience to our customers.

As a consequence of that hosts on Agoda Homes started to see an increase in bookings as customers were able to easily find what they are looking for and make decisions based on that.

THE TAKEAWAY

Designing experiences for small screens such as mobile devices can be very challenging. There is a tendency to think that we should include every possible feature or information that is available just in case users may need it.

But in reality the context of using a mobile device is different from desktop usage, and so we need to research and find the true needs of users, and how can we present it in a way that is not overwhelming and destructing from what really matters.

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