Priceline iPhone
From 2011 – 2016, I work on the iOS team at Priceline, first as a Senior Product Designer and then as the Design Lead overseeing all of the mobile products. When I was hired, there was a bare-bones MVP app that a small skunkworks-style team released as a proof of concept. Oddly enough, there was some skepticism from within the company that people would purchase hotel rooms on their phones (and the thought of buying an airline ticket was straight-up crazy talk). Turned out, people were buying hotel rooms on their iPhones, so a team was formed and I was lucky enough to be the first designer. When I started, mobile bookings were responsible for ~5% of bookings. By the time I left, we hit 50%.
The app has been featured in:
• Travel & Leisure (March 2014): First Look: Priceline Debuts New Hotel and Flight Search Tools
• App Store: Travel, New & Noteworthy, Discover America, Top Overall, Deals & Rewards, Best New App
• CondéNast Traveler (Aug 2013): Must-Have App for Every Trip
• Travel & Leisure (Aug 2013): Best Apps and Websites for Traveler
An overview of some of the projects I worked on
Retail hotel path
Priceline has three ways to purchase a hotel room. The standard retail path, the Express Deals path (aka mystery hotel), and Name Your Own Price, which is what the company is most famous for.
The existing app was an old-school skeuomorphic design style. The release of iOS7 gave our team the opportunity to rethink and improve upon the existing iPhone experience. The UI got a major update to a more flat and simplified appearance consistent with Apple’s guidelines.
We took a look to see what improvements could be made to help our customers in their hotel search. Based on user testing and A/B testing, we added an entirely new feature called "Deals Near Me" to help people find hotels within a specified radius around their current location. Additional features that were added later include the ability to pay with ApplePay or PayPal, "favorite" a hotel, and look up past & future trips and re-book.
My responsibilities were wireframes, experience, and visual design.
Express Deals
Express Deals was the new product that Priceline released to compete with Hotwire. Express Deals fell between a retail hotel where the booker knows exactly what they’re getting and a Name Your Own Price hotel where the booker only knows the general location and star rating of the hotel. In addition to the general location and star rating, Express Deals showed guaranteed amenities, which helps make booking decisions.
Priceline wanted to increase bookings through Express Deals because Name Your Own Price growth was flat. I worked closely with the VP of Product on a new feature we called “Unlocked Deals”. The way it worked was, if someone booked a hotel through Express Deals, they would “unlock” that hotel. The next time they used the app to book a hotel in the same area, that hotel would show up in the list as “unlocked”. We legally couldn’t say what the hotel was, but we gave them a hint ;).
We were inspired by the trends in the data that customers would often book the same hotel multiple times in a year. By adding the “you’ve booked this hotel before”, we gave our loyal repeat customers a reason to come back and book again.
The ability to unlock hotels was a hit with both new and existing users–resulting in a 13% conversion lift as well as increased retention rates.
Name Your Own Price
Name Your Own Price (NYOP) is the foundation upon which Priceline was built, so naturally, it would be included in the iOS. When the first iOS app was built, everything was a test (it was an incredible time to be working on apps!). The NYOP path was pretty much a desktop version crammed into a small screen, which was not uncommon at that time. One of my first projects was to get a viable mobile path in the app.
The way that NYOP worked on the desktop was quite simple. There were two steps, 1) choose a location and star level and 2) place your bid. All on the same screen. The belief being that having everything on one screen increased conversion.
I proposed adding an additional step and breaking up the process into 3 separate screens. More taps, but easier to understand and use. The mobile team was small and open to experimentation, so we built it…. and it worked.
The new 3-step NYOP path:
Increased conversion
+10% to NYOP
+4% to overall iOS hotel
Decreased customer service calls
-24% wrong city
-53% wrong area
-57% wrong star