Booking.com / Rideways
Supplier Partner Portal web app & Customer Website
UX Designer | 2018
During my time working with Booking.com in their Rental Cars Booking Go offices in Manchester, I lead the design on multiple projects simultaneously. The core project I was tasked with was the re-design of Rental cars taxi rides booking system and the taxi operator’s mobile application which was partnered to it. Also covering the customer experience for the rider. This large project involved creating a new look and feel for the product. Including mapping and designing user journeys, designing seamless user experience, creating detailed style guides and pattern libraries for development teams as well as building rapid prototypes to conducting user testing.
Skills Employed: UX Design, UI Design, Prototyping, User testing Interviews, Remote Testing, HTML, CSS, Email Design, Style Guides.
Tools Used: Sketch, Axure, Zeplin, Invision, User Zoom, Google Analytics
Identifying the problem
Research & Insight Gathering
Rental Cars/Rideways had recently been acquired by Booking.com when I was hired for the project. Their taxi web app booking system needed a re-fresh of the UX and look and feel. The re-design project was to cover both the supplier side (Taxi partner companies), their drivers ride management app and the customer facing side (The rider). The scope covered including new features such as live journey tracking and live driver reporting. The UX/UI of the existing products was some-what dated and the experience not at all user centred. Booking offices struggled to use the application and so this impacted on their business causing issues with missed rides as well as disputes with Rental Cars. Overall a poor experience for both the supplier and customer.
Design Process & Solutions
Ideation, Design & Prototyping
I began the project by conducting early user interviews in various locations around Manchester with the general public. The purpose of this was to gain valuable insight into how people booked, communicated with taxi firms and their experience of pre-booked taxi journeys. Stakeholders and I began with a series of kick-off project workshops of discovery to sketch and wireframe early ideas and prototype core user journeys for the supplier portal. These ideas were tested with users and feedback helped the next steps in design iteration. Meanwhile I was also creating a new design system for the application using a material design style aligned to the Rideways Brand.
The Outcome
Results
Release of the supplier partner portal saw cancelled and missed ride booking decrease by 60% in the first 6 weeks. By 3 months and with an additional release with bug fixes, cancelled and missed ride bookings decreased by over 80%.
The driver app was proven to be successful in reducing driver no shows, tracking and communicating with drivers, increased driver satisfaction and customer experience.
My Design Process
-
Every project begins with understanding and research. Identifying and understanding the problems of a product or an idea and how something works is at the base of every project I tackle.
-
After the understanding of the problem has been thoroughly researched and understood I then begin to ideate through, sketching, holding workshops, creating mockup designs and prototyping journeys and flows .
-
Testing designs and user experiences with human beings is the next step in the process, and the way of validating ideas explored in the previous process of sketching and designing potential solutions. The insights gathered from user testing is assessed and the learnings then help to evolve the design and thinking.
-
After testing and iterating, testing again if necessary it’s then time to start refining and finalising designs into a finished product ready to be built by development teams. Project depending, development can also be part of the test process for A/B test and other forms of validating designs in a live environment. Final designs will be thouroughly tested again for QA to ensure design and behavious are correctly implemented.