Case study: Where’s my trip?
How a few small changes can make a big difference to feature discoverability
A lot of designers today are well versed with technology and mobile interfaces. Contemporary smartphone behaviour, like gestures, navigation, and iconography, has become so second-nature to us that we sometimes forget that everyone else still finds them novel and daunting.
Thus, when we’re trying to solve simple problems, our assumptions unconsciously become a barrier to inclusiveness.
This article mainly focuses on two giant learnings I’ve gained from a relatively small UX project:
1. What’s obvious to you, may not be obvious to someone else
2. When done right, tiny tweaks can make a big impact
The Problem
When booking a trip through an Online Travel Agent (OTA), users who are familiar with mobile apps know that all their bookings can be found in a single place somewhere.
Think of when you’re shopping on Amazon — a tech-savvy user knows that they need to look for something like ‘My Orders’ to see their order history.
This is a feature we all take for granted — and we assume that our users will know about it too. The reality is quite different. On GoIbibo, we noticed that once our users had made a booking, they didn’t know where to find that booking when they returned to the app.
To new internet users, and users on the older side, it was not obvious to look for bookings under ‘My Trips’ — even though it was displayed upfront on the bottom navigation.
On further inspection, we realised that nowhere on the booking success page did we mention how or where to access their ticket later on.
What an oversight! Fixing this could make a huge difference to our post-sales experience. We experimented with different ways of going about it and decided on a three-fold approach:
- Provide an entry point to ‘My Trips’ on the booking success page (above the fold)
- Give another entry point, this time with detailed information, about what to expect from ‘My Trips’ (below the fold)
- On launching the app, create awareness among users of the ‘My Trips’ page in the bottom navigation
1. Primary Entry Point
While designing the entry point above the fold, the key premise we held on to was this — Once a payment is made, what is most crucial to an anxious user is whether their booking has been successful or not.
No matter what, we must not compromise on reassuring the user of their booking status.
Hence, we stuck to minimal design changes which blended in well with the booking status messages.
2. Manage Booking widget
Aside from getting calls and email from customers who wanted their ticket re-sent to them, users also didn’t know that many actions could be easily performed on the app without any customer support assistance.
Our current design lacked this education, and we decided to mend it by providing the top 3 booking actions a user could perform themselves. The choices that are displayed were based purely on user data.
3. Awareness on Homepage
Finally, the added triplicate of showing our users that ‘My Trips’ existed, by using nudges on the homepage. This ensured that even if the user misses our prompts right after booking, a returning customer with a booking will always know where to go once they launch their app.
Results
The changes made here may seem minimal and straight-forward, but that didn’t make them any less impactful.
Once we rolled out these changes, we noticed a 50% increase in people visiting ‘My Trips’ in the same session.
Thanks to the efforts put in by the product team, design team and our relentless developers, we were able to deliver this new experience to our users extremely fast.
It just goes to show, letting go of our ingrown biases and emphasizing the smallest details goes a long way in to building a successful, user-friendly product.
