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Organizing and dividing the cost of a group trip
should be a seamless experience

As the leading platform for short-term lodging and distinctive travel experiences, Airbnb has over 150 million users worldwide. The surge of bookings post-Covid has led to double the number of bookings in 2022, exceeding its pre-pandemic high in 2020.

With over 75% of users traveling in groups, my teammate and I sought out to investigate and design a research led feature to enhance the group booking process. We split the work and contributed equally in each process, resulting in a successful collaboration of ideas.

The goal is to create a more specialized path for users who would like to book in groups as a strategy to drive higher revenue by facilitating more group bookings.

Understanding the group booking experience

What is the current group booking process?

Our aim was to uncover user pain points across the entire process, from planning to payment, in order to identify any opportunities for designing targeted solutions that address these specific challenges. 

We opted for a survey as it was a quicker way to gather ample user data and would allow us to expedite the ideation and prototyping phases. Prior to crafting the survey, the following assumptions guided our approach:

• Users find it difficult to plan a group trip due to the logistical effort, and are therefore open to solution that could automate some of the effort
  
• Users are constrained by time when planning a group trip and will always prefer a streamlined method to efficiently organize details for a trip

We conducted a survey with 20 participants to understand:

How users plan and organize a group trip

What frustrations they have with their method or process


We found that most users typically followed these steps when planning a group trip:






Some of the responses:

“Finding a date that works for everyone can sometimes be difficult especially if its a big group“ - Step 2

“The process is annoying, because there's a fair bit of admin and always one person (at least) who doesn't transfer the money quickly enough” - Step 6

“Having an option of splitting it directly on the app would be great” - Step 4

“I don't always have the reservation details myself if the other person has booked it and I can sometimes forget if a person paid already, a bit hard to keep track of it all” - Step 6

We analyzed the data using Dovetail and identified the following pain points as the most frequently mentioned:

Setup effort (steps 1-4)

Users need to establish a group chat, employ a spreadsheet, or utilize a tool to manage plans and payments, involving significant administrative work, coordination and time investment. 

Agreeing as a group (step 2)

This process often relies on other traveler's circumstances, such as budget constraints and travel date availability, posing challenges in maintaining easy tracking.

Following up on payment (step 3-5)

Arguably the most prevalent pain point, users expressed strong dissatisfaction with the need to monitor payments and engage in repeated follow-ups to coordinate the payment process.

Problem Statement:

Group travelers need an efficient solution for booking accommodations and splitting payments to streamline the entire process, from agreeing on accommodations to reducing the time and stress involved in tracking and chasing individual payments.

2. Define

Competitor Analysis

Before we started ideating, we wanted to analyze of some of the apps that were mentioned in the interview to get a better sense of what solutions are currently out there. Since our direct competitors- such as vrbo and booking.com- did not have any specific solutions tailored to the group booking process, we decided to focus on our indirect competitors below. 

1. Monzo

The most commonly used payment split option, Monzo has a very intuitive UI that lets users split the bill with minimal steps. Users can also access their contact list or easily send a payment link to other users without a Monzo account, making it a seamless experience. 

How might we integrate this seamless experience into our solution?

2. Splitwise

Designed purely for splitting payments, Splitwise also has an untuitive UI that is very user friendly. Its supplementary features, including currency conversion, spending charts, and detailed split breakdown provides convenient and time-saving solutions for various ad hoc tasks associated with planning trips for groups.

How might we integrate the added value observed in solutions like Splitwise into our own?

3. Ideate

Ideating the solution

Building on insights from user research and competitor analysis, our next step was to dive into ideation, exploring various solutions to address the identified pain points.

We first used a mindmap to identify specific areas in airbnb’s current process that we wanted to focus on. Next, we used crazy 8’s to ideate potential solutions for how those solutions could look like.

Our ideation process resulted in the following:

A collaborative way to choose an accommodation

Since Airbnb’s wishlist already had a collaborative feature built in, we decided to expand on it by:

• Allowing users to easily add other members to a wishlist
  
• Giving group members the ability to ‘like’ a property in order to easily check the group preference
  

A clear way to split the payment that is easy and flexible

• Properties booked from a group wishlist will automatically display the group members split at checkout
  
• Easily add other group members at checkout
  
• The option to split by amount or percentage
  

A simple view for monitoring payments and doing follow-ups

• Clear breakdown of who has paid and who hasn’t
• An easy way to follow up on payment
  

2. Define

Defining the solution

The main thing we wanted to take into account was ensuring the solutions we had would seamlessly integrate into Airbnb’s existing UI as much as possible. 

User Flow 1 - Creating a group wishlist

• In the existing flow, a user can save an accommodation into a wishlist by adding a like. In the new flow, we wanted to add an option to choose a solo or group wishlist.
  

User Flow 2 - Managing the group wishlist

• The largest addition to the existing user flow, we wanted to create a new view for the group wishlist that would have 2 new features: Adding group members and liking* an accommodation

User Flow 3 - Splitting the cost and following up on payment

• As one of the key features, we wanted to design a simple and intuitive interface that would give the user a flexible option to split the cost by amount or percentage- reducing the need for manual calculations. 
• Once the payment has been split, we wanted to give users a simple and straightforward overview to keep track of who’s paid and make it easy to follow up on payment.

*We originally wanted to use ‘votes’ but decided to keep the original liking functionality that users are already familiar with.

The added feature here would be the ability to see how many other members of the group have liked an accommodation.

Low-Fidelity Screens

Utilizing the user flow to define what screens to prototype, we created low-fidelity mockups to start locking down what the features would look like. 

We based the features roughly on the existing Airbnb UI and mostly focused on maintaining a seamless user flow at this stage.

Matching the existing UI

Since a lot of our features have new elements that do not exist within the existing UI, we wanted to ensure that the components we build follow the original components as much as possible. 

Creating our own style guide

We referenced Airbnb’s design system in order to built our own style guide, including the colour palette, text style and spacing. 

Creating the components

Using our low-fidelity screens as a starting point, we identified essential elements shared across various screens, converting them into components for a streamlined and consistent process in building out the final screens.

The final prototype

Since a lot of our features have new elements that do not exist within the existing UI, we wanted to ensure that the components we build follow the original components as much as possible. 

A/B testing opportunity

For the third user flow, we ideated on the most effective way to display the payment status for each traveller. We wanted to make it as easy to see at a glance and narrowed down the options to 2 below:

If we were able to conduct an A/B test, the KPI’s we would measure would be click rate and user engagement. We would use the insights from the test to determine which UI is more effective at prompting user interaction and increasing engagement. 

Usability Testing

We conducted an unmoderated user test using Maze to test the functionality of our 3 user flows with 16 testers. We created a scenario for the testers that involved booking a group trip with 3 friends that involved:

1. Ceating a group wishlist
   
   
2. Adding group members into a wishlist
   
   
3. Liking an accommodation
   
   
4. Booking the accommodation with the most likes and splitting the total cost
   
   
5. Following up on payment
   

The overall results of the survey was very positive. Users rated the overall group booking experience at 8.7!

The testers performed well across all tasks except for #1 and #3- it was surprising how many of the testers weren’t familiar with the wishlist functionality to begin with, resulting in them skipping it altogether. 

However, there was some feedback regarding the visibility of the group payment summary and the mechanism of the ‘like’ function in the group wishlist. 


"All great, just thought the reminder part, had to scroll quite far to see who hadnt paid (not sure if that was visible at the start of the screen) and maybe some kind of colour to make it more obvious who hasnt paid would be useful"

"I really loved the experience when booking the accommodation, the user interface is very clear and the features are simple to use ! However, dealing with the likes in the wishlist was a bit messy for me, but the idea to choose the best place to go together is such a good idea... Love it "



Key Changes

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Based on the user feedback, we decided to make the following changes:

1. Making the group payment overview more visible:

     Moving the overview to the top of the page right so that users can immediately see the summary

     Applying a drop shadow to the unpaid user's avatar for improved visibility and user-friendly flagging.

2. Improving the UI for the like functionality in the group wishlist:

     Introducing the voting avatar as soon as a group wishlist is created to familiarize users to the feature

What I learned

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Assumptions are important. One big assumption we made early on was that most users will be familiar with the wishlist function, and we proceeded to design a large part of our solution based on this. 

In the future, I would spend a bit more time on gathering assumptions either through user research or looking at usage data to better define the solution earlier on.

Streamlining smaller design decisions could expedite product delivery. We spent a lot of time deciding small UI changes such as shape and colour- in our case deciding the layout for the group payment overview- which slowed us down a bit.

Perhaps this could have been a good opportunity to perform an A/B test to check which layout could work better for users!