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I was contracted by Booking.com for a year and a half as a Lead UX Designer to help optimize and increase their accommodation bookings. My primary goals were to enhance the conversion rate on the accommodation side, create a unified design system, and streamline the process for creating marketing pages.
During my time at Booking.com I had 3 major projects
Increasing and Optimizing Conversion Rates for Accommodation
Creating a Unified Design System for Accommodation Pages
Accelerating the Creation of Marketing Pages
To begin, I conducted a comprehensive analysis of Booking.com’s product. This included delving into user feedback, performing user testing, and scrutinizing tracking and behavioral data.
I identified key improvement areas and focused on optimizing the hero page. I employed a scientific approach, analyzing the impact of the top banner on traffic. Starting with a 50% viewport height (VH) for the banner, I tested various heights up to 100% to determine the best conversion rate.
After numerous A/B tests, we discovered that a 70% VH performed best. Next, I applied the same methodology to balance image and text content, finding out that a 70% (VH) combined with a 50% (VW) image-text split was most effective.
These modifications led to a 20% increase in overall page performance.
I began by meticulously reviewing all existing designs, creating components for each design element, and ensuring cohesive integration across all designs.
Over a year, alongside three other designers, we developed an extensive design system. This system enabled anyone to create new designs in seconds by simply dragging and dropping components. This innovation reduced the time required to create a new page by 70%, resulting in significant time savings for the team. At one point, we even found ourselves waiting for developers to implement our designs due to our increased efficiency.
I conducted workshops with various stakeholders to understand their needs and reviewed the history of marketing campaigns. After understanding the requirements and consulting with developers, I developed a unique design system. This system allowed not just designers but also marketing managers to create promotional pages for events by dragging and dropping components in Figma.
A notable example is the Super Bowl campaign featuring Idris Elba, which was entirely designed using the system I developed.
Before this project, creating a campaign page took approximately four weeks. After implementing the new design system and building components in React, this time was reduced to just five working days.
This project was a massive success, contributing to a £44M increase in sales for Booking.com. Additionally, the implementation of both the accommodation and marketing design systems significantly saved time for designers, showcasing the value of a well-structured design approach.