As a quick overview on this project, Streamline is a Vacation Rental Software company that provides solutions for rental managers to help them manage leads and maximize vacation rental bookings. Bizcor works in conjunction with Streamline and utilizes their software to create direct booking Conversion based websites for rental Managers. The task with this project was to revamp the old outdated comparison tool. This tool is accessed through the search results page of a given vacation rental site after a user has made a search inquiry. From the search results page - the user has the option to select properties for comparison. It allows the user to compare vacation rentals based on a wide variety of amenities and rental details.
At the start of this project, the existing architecture for the comparison tool was as follows: the user would have to select three properties from the search results and would then be automatically taken to the comparison page. Once here, the page would display the three selected properties along with their rental details and amenities listed across the page.
Based on feedback from current clients using our comparison tool, the pain points of the user included:
After conducting research in tandem with a fellow designer on the team, we found current comparison tool solutions already in the wild and discovered similar and familiar design patterns across most of these solutions. Wanting to keep the overall design pattern of the tool familiar to the user, rather than reinventing the wheel I set out to create an intuitive solution custom tuned to a vacation rental audience that would help them make their decision on deciding which rental is right for them.
Once the initial mockup was created it was shared and tested with the rest of the development and design team. We found that it wasn't intuitive for the user that they could click and drag horizontally across the screen if more than three properties had been selected. To help mitigate this, clickable arrows were added at the bottom of the screen to help the user recognize that they can side scroll or click the arrows to view the rest of the properties that they had selected. Another thing that we found that was missing from the initial mockup was an easy way to go back and add properties for comparison. For this - a button was added in the top left of the comparison tool that would take the user back to the search results where they can then add additional properties for comparison.
For only having a week to conduct research, create an initial mockup, user test and then remedy the missing pieces of the design before passing off to development, I'm very happy with how the comparison tool was evolved.
We were successfully able to remedy the original interface by implementing the following features:
The outcome of this project resulted in a significant increase in users correctly using the comparison tool and ultimately helped to increase client conversions (most notably on mobile devices) as far more users were able to be linked directly to the rental of their choosing for booking. Given more time I would have tested the second iteration of the design on our target audience. This is likely something that we will do in the future so that we can reiterate on the comparison tool design and continue to improve it.
