Intro

I led UX for the search, discovery, and shopping teams, covering both web and apps, which were the primary revenue drivers for the company. I prioritized embedding UX into product teams and establishing healthy collaborative environments. I shifted the teams’ focus from short-term tactics to long-term strategic thinking, growing the team to meet business needs and coaching individuals towards their career goals. I initiated efforts for end-to-end consistency and introduced foundational research activities to drive a clearer understanding of customers. These initiatives helped create a cohesive and strategic UX approach, enhancing both team performance and customer satisfaction.

Vrbo apps can be downloaded from the Appstore, Playstore, or accessed directly from Vrbo.com

1. Consistent experiences

Property displays

Problem

When travelers navigated Vrbo’s experience, depending what page or screen they were viewing, they would see different and/or inconsistent details about a property. The main reason for this was because individual teams were responsible for specific pages, and each team optimized independently for their own key success metrics. Over time, property displays diverged more and more.

As you can see in the screenshots above, when navigating from page to page, you would see the following inconsistencies:

• Featured property image

• Hierarchy and ordering of content

• Property attribute highlights

• Badging

• Layout orientation

In addition, because each property display was built and optimized individually, we struggled to get clean results when testing different property recommendation models.

Approach

After my team audited and documented the experience issues, I pitched the opportunity to product stakeholders for increasing velocity and improving customer experiences by standardizing this experience with creating reusable components and assigning ownership to a single team. After many cross-team discussions, I got buy-in to kick off the effort.

To ensure we designed a flexible solution that supported the various use cases, we initiated research to better understand the following:

• What property info is critical vs nice-to-have when a user decides whether to view the full property details?

• What property information was most valuable at different stages of the shopping process, and was it different at each stage?

Solution

When it came to defining the solution, we understood from our research learnings that there was some property information that was always critical to display, such as; number of bedrooms and bathrooms, price, and ratings. Whereas other property information was only helpful in certain scenarios. For example, if a user initiates a search for “Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica,” it’s not helpful for the user to display that location on every property in the search results - it’s only helpful to display if one of the properties isn’t in that location.

We created a solution that used the size of the display to dictate how much (or how little) content we would show, and then established rules for content hierarchy and consistency.

Validation

Even though we used customer feedback to guide our design decisions, we still needed to validate that the end solution helped travelers discover the right properties more efficiently. We did this in three ways:

1. Usability testing

   • By creating task scripts that aligned with core discovery journeys, we challenged participants to find and decide on properties that matched specific criteria that was important for the group they would be traveling with.

   • Result: We were able to measure a reduction in task completion time against the control experience.

2. Short AB tests to gather signal on direction

   • We turned on two small temporary AB tests within different parts of the experience to ensure the changes wouldn’t have a negative impact on core success metrics.

   • Result: One test was trending positive, while the other was trending slightly negatively, but was still within a range we felt comfortable moving forward with.

3. End-to-end AB test

   • We ran a large scale AB test across multiple pages of the experience, including across web, iOS and Android apps. This test ran for multiple weeks to ensure we reached power in all parts of the experience.

Results

+3% increase in property bookings & increase in property engagement

This change proved to be the most successful test the Search and Recommendations team ran in 2019, but also increased the efficiency for future recommendation model changes, and increased experience consistency across our three app experiences.

Native search experience

Problem

Historically, our iOS and Android apps were owned by different teams, which naturally resulted in differing experiences. When bringing the teams together across Web, iOS, and Android, my team was able to highlight the inconsistencies that we had created over time and encouraged a future state where the content and functionality across the three platforms could be more consistent.

Our app functionality and design systems trailed what he had on our web experiences, so a big focus of this effort was to bring many of our new Vrbo design system pieces into our app experiences, including colors, type, components, etc. It was also important to include some of the search, recommendations, and filter improvements we had built on web into our app experience as well. Additionally, this was an opportunity to up-level some experiences within our apps due to better technology available in a native environment (like interactive maps).

Approach

My team started by auditing and highlighting the inconsistencies between platforms and deviations from our design system. We then started designing and prototyping a new search flow that aligned to our goals.

Because we were moving away from multiple different experiences, we decided to prioritize our research efforts towards usability instead of doing something more comparative. After multiple rounds of usability, and collecting feedback from our native and design system stake holders, we aligned towards one solution.

Solution

Results

This experience was being built when I transitioned to Indeed in October of 2020. Though I don’t know what impact these changes had on company success metrics, these did role out to all users as the default experience shortly after my leaving.

2. Gaining deeper customer understanding

*Case study coming soon

Last updated: Dec 2024