Benjamin Currie

Clear communication between Booking.com's accommodation partners and their guests is paramount for a successful stay. Prior to their trip a guest might want to communicate with someone in order to make a request or get clarity on a topic. We discovered that the current communication methods were not ideal, email was perceived as slow and phone meant the guest had no record of the conversation in addition to potential roaming fees while travelling.

We designed and built the Booking.com Messaging Platform out of the need for a quick communication tool between the guest and accommodation partner. As a designer on the team I had to design solutions for specific problems such as parties not speaking the same language, expressing different time zones, displaying how responsive properties were, how messages were threaded and how users would be notified of new messages. The platform was required to be accessible across all devices so we designed, built and launched across both web, native apps and email at the same time.

Role Qualitative research, Quantitative research, Prototyping, App & Web design, Design strategy

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To continue it's strong growth Booking.com needed to look towards new markets and created a team dedicated to improving the experience for Hostels and the Backpacker segment. My role as a designer in this cross-functional team was to identify opportunities within the Backpacking market that Booking.com could leverage for a competitive advantage.

Through initial research it became clear that a "backpacker" traveller had very different needs than our other customers, backpackers were willing to forgo or share certain amenities in order to save money. Partnered with research I conducted interviews and various card sorting exercises with backpackers in order to get an understanding of what motivated them in their decision making process when selecting a hostel. With this understanding I worked with the team to redefine the information architecture and user flows to make it easier for backpackers to find the best hostel for their stay. I then prototyped the new experience and iterated through rounds of user testing continually learning and improving the designs until we were confident with the end result.

One of the biggest challenges was how we would introduce the new experience to our target audience. Since a backpacker cannot be easily identified by their behaviour we worked with marketing to target a specific audience and demographic through newer social media campaigns. Through the work that myself and the team did on the hostels topic, Booking.com is now one of the market leaders in the segment in terms of options available and nights booked.

Role Qualitative research, Quantitative research, Prototyping, Design strategy

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