Role: Design Director
Scope: Design strategy, template architecture, content strategy, UX of Homepage, 18 month experience roadmap
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Result: Transformed the Home experience through AI-powered personalization and shoppable content that supports new trip discovery and return visit continuation for travelers—delivering $120M profit growth through enhanced engagement and booking conversion.
Context:
The legacy Home experience was "one size-fits-all" with visitors getting the same boiler plate content. Originally the role of Home was transactional—search and merchandising were the only entry points for travelers. Even returning visitors have static content between visits (56% of returning app visitors have made a previous search - we gather that intent signal, yet travelers can’t effortlessly pick up where they left off). Ultimately the experience was not personalized to the traveler's needs or preferences which reflected the underlying architecture that was not built to enable dynamic content and limited our ability to offer adaptive experiences.
Project Goals:
- Define new role of home within the evolved app ecosystem
- Create a new, adaptive home template architecture
- Define needed ML and partner team capabilities
- Create an 18 month experience roadmap
- Define a new operating model across teams that connect to Home
- Increase 7 Day Visitor Repeat Rate to all BEXG Visitors from 57% to 58% -> 62% (+1 % 2022, 10% by 2024)
- Create a new, adaptive home template architecture
- Define needed ML and partner team capabilities
- Create an 18 month experience roadmap
- Define a new operating model across teams that connect to Home
- Increase 7 Day Visitor Repeat Rate to all BEXG Visitors from 57% to 58% -> 62% (+1 % 2022, 10% by 2024)
Not only were we to envision and deliver a more compelling and useful experience, our metrics also changed to driving retention and repeat visits—a shift from an acquisition focus. We moved from a single session visitor to supporting a multi-session visitor who has changing needs depending where they are in the trip journey. To achieve this, we needed to evolve the role of home and the principles that guided the experience.
Guiding Principles
INSPIRE & DISCOVER Inspire travelers with layered continuous discovery at every stage of their journey, leveraging signals to tailor our vast offerings to what is most relevant when they land on Home.
BUILD EXCITEMENT & ANTICIPATION Travel is a visceral experience. Bring this emotional connection to the trip planning process through immersive content on Home that increases confidence and builds anticipation.
PROACTIVE ASISTANCE Support our travelers by being one step ahead. Anticipate and surface what is most timely, contextual and helpful directly on Home.
Design Strategy
We user tested multiple organizing principles in search of what would be most intuitive and helpful for travelers just starting their exploration as well as planning multiple trips.
By reorganizing content on home across 'get inspired' and 'keep planning' tabs will help travelers easily access content that supports their goal on home, reducing scroll time and supporting their mental model to effectively inspire their next trip and nudge them to keep planning their trip; driving an increase in tab engagement, trip engagement (items saved, booked and attached items) and home visitor return rate
New Home Architecture
To enable an adaptive experience, the underlying page architecture needed to be redone to accommodate a new template API, personalization context layer, and integration with AdaptEx to orchestrate the selection of content.
The components of this template are sections, blocks and variants. As part of our content strategy, we defined sections based off user value and then assigned content to each section to create a structure for both current information and future additions. We worked with stakeholders across engineering, ML and data science to align on a new structure that would ultimately unlock many new capabilities for personalized content.
Mapping the Adaptive Home Experience
The role of Home evolves with where travelers are in the trip planning journey. We defined how the role of Home adjusts to the trip phases and began the process of mapping content to scenarios across the journey.
Experience Milestones
Our team collaborated with stakeholders to create experience milestones which would illustrate a path from today to our fully adaptive and personalized Home. The goal of this exercise was to show the shared experience outcomes that would merry the UX, evolving UI and key platform capabilities needed to make cohesive step-changes in our Home experience.
Outcomes
Rollout has begun on Milestone 1 with a new structure and content types being released across App and desktop
Transformed the Home experience through AI-powered personalization and shoppable content that supports new trip discovery and return visit continuation for travelers—delivering $120M profit growth through enhanced engagement and booking conversion.
Lessons learned:
Throughout the project, it was clear that we needed to define new ways of working to ensure alignment in vision and execution. First, with other App-connected teams. Home was now functioning as an orchestrator that would lead users through to other parts of the app. To meet this need, I initiated and facilitated the creation of a cross-experience working group to tie in with other product areas that connected into the home experience. This, along with workshops with partner teams, helped us to further define the relationship between different product areas to create clarity for users and avoid duplication of functionality. The goal was creating a seamless click-through experience.
In working with our engineers to build out this new format, we highlighted areas where our build and test environments also needed to adapt. This led to the addition of new scenarios in the regression testing to assure true functionality was built as designed and that we didn't create gaps in functionality as we went through more significant changes. Also ongoing conversations are happening around the TnL approach for larger experience shift releases.
Overall, we evolved Home to be not only an adaptive and relevant landing experience for travelers, but unlocked new testing veins for increased engagement that continues to be a rich value driver for the app today.
Cross- Team Alignment
Stemming from our collaborative effort to map experience milestones, we socialized and invited feedback and refinement from partner teams to further align on coordination and capability timing across an 18 mo horizon.
