Booking.com
I was contracted by Booking.com for over a year as a Lead UX Designer to help increase their accommodation bookings.
My main goals were to improve the conversion rate on the accommodation side, create a unified design system, and speed up the process of creating marketing pages.
My projects
During my time at Booking.com I had 3 major projects:
Increasing conversion rates for accommodation
Creating a unified design system for accommodation pages
Speeding up the creation of marketing pages
1. Increasing conversion rates for accommodation
To begin, I ran a full analysis of Booking.com’s product. This included digging into user feedback, running user tests, and studying tracking and behavior data.
I found the key areas to improve and focused on the hero section of the page. I took a scientific approach and tested how the height of the top banner affected traffic. Starting with the banner at 50% of the screen height (VH), I tested heights all the way up to 100% to find the best conversion rate.
After many A/B tests, we found that 70% VH performed best. Next, I used the same method to balance image and text. A 70% VH banner with a 50/50 split between image and text worked best.
These changes led to a 20% increase in overall page performance.
2. Creating a unified design system for accommodation pages
I began by reviewing every existing design, creating components for each design element, and making sure they all worked together.
Over a year, alongside three other designers, we built a large design system. It let anyone create new designs by dragging and dropping components. This cut the time it took to create a new page by 70%. At one point, we were even waiting on developers to build our designs because we were moving so fast.
3. Speeding up the creation of marketing pages
I ran workshops with stakeholders to understand their needs, and reviewed the history of past marketing campaigns. After mapping the requirements with the developers, I built a design system just for campaigns. It let both designers and marketing managers create promotional pages by dragging and dropping components in Figma.
One example is Booking.com’s 2022 Super Bowl campaign with Idris Elba, which was designed entirely with this system.
Before this project, building a campaign page took about five weeks. After we launched the new design system and built its components in React, it took two.
Overall impact
This work was part of a team effort that added $44M in revenue for Booking.com. Both design systems also saved the designers a lot of time, which shows what a well-built design system is worth.