Design a solution for group bookings

Summary

Employer: Housemates

Role: UI/UX Designer

Product: B2C Student accommodation marketplace

Users: Students

We understood the value that group bookings brought to our business in terms of revenue and student acquisition, but both our users and the business were being held back by the existing solution.

I was tasked with designing a new feature to allow students to book accommodation with their group easily.

Research

I began by familiarising myself with the existing group bookings process as well as other solutions in the industry.

Methods:

Interviewed students who had booked as a group previously with us to understand their experience.
Interviewed internal customer service agents to understand the steps involved to process a group booking.
Conducted competitor analyses to better understand existing solutions in the industry.

I discovered that it is a very manual and inefficient process with numerous touch-points involving internal customer service agents, students and accommodation building managers.

Findings

I discovered that:

It is a very manual and inefficient process with numerous touch-points involving internal customer service agents, students and accommodation building managers.
It was common practice for one student to "lead" their group, and the rest simply follow suit or join the process when the booking is ready to be placed.
Transparency was important for both customer service agents and students in order to keep track of their booking without the need to go offline and ring up for updates.
There was an opportunity in allowing group creation to take place further up the funnel at the initial browsing or enquiry stage which would improve retention.

Ideation and iteration

I began by mapping out potential journey maps that would take into account students, customer service agents and accommodation providers. I worked closely with the business on this in order to help determine a new sustainable process that the product solution could feed into.

Once a new process had been refined, I created designs from sketches through to high fidelity prototypes for further testing and iteration.

Outcome

Our new group bookings feature offers a seamless solution for group creation that can be accessed at different points through the student journey thanks to it being an isolated flow. It allows students to book their accommodation with their group easily, while also being able to track everyone's progress in terms of deposit payments and tenancy signing. The business can now acquire and retain groups better, with greater transparency.