Split Payment for Booking.com
A solution using JTBD and user flow
Client
With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. At Booking.com, we connect travelers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay.
(an academic project carried out at Ironhack’s UX/UI bootcamp)
What I did
UX: Research, problem statement, user persona.
Interaction: Jobs to be done, user flow, lo and mid-fidelity prototype, tests.
UI: Hi-fidelity interactive prototype.
Scope
4 days sprint.
Individual project.
Project goals
Add the functionality to split the payment between travelers through Booking.com respecting the current product and creating a meaningful user experience.
Research
Research goals
Since the feature was already defined in the briefing before the research, I started the research to confirm or refute my hypothesis:
Users want to split the payment for accommodations directly on Booking.com because it’s uncomfortable to remind others to pay what they owe.
Research methods
Online survey — 55 answers
In-person interview — 6 people
Benchmarking
Key findings
When traveling with other people, someone books for everyone and they share the payment later.
Bank transfer is still the most common way to pay or get paid, which means that it depends on people to do the payment manually.
People get frustrated when their friends take time to pay.
It bothers them to charge or remind their friends to make the payment.
The problem
Travelers who book and pay for accommodations for their friends need a way to split these expenses in an automated and objective way because they are uncomfortable having to remember and charge their friends to make the payment.
The solution
I used Jobs To Be Done to understand if the solutions will impact the user at a functional and emotional level (personal and social) and after that I created some User Flows to understand where the new feature will be placed and what are the steps in the process to be able to split the payment and enable everyone to pay it.
The User Flow helped me to understand the whole process of splitting the payment and how everyone involved would interact with the app.
The option to split the payment will add some steps into the checkout process, and for the first release of the feature, I’m suggesting to bring some dialogs with information explaining how it will work if the user chooses to split the payment:
And after the checkout is complete, it can have some different user flows depending if the other guests will pay their share of the accommodation. The idea is to keep the main user (the one that made the booking) informed about other guests’ status.
Next steps
User Persona # 2
Define the user persona “travel companion” and design all their experience making the payment of their part of the accommodation.
A / B Testing
Test other solutions to split the payment with less text, more images and without dialog boxes.
Key learnings
JTBD
This was the first time I used Jobs To Be Done and I loved it. I’m sure that it will help a lot to prioritize what to do when you have more scenarios and users.
Documentation
For the next projects, I would like to improve my iteration documentation. I don’t have all the versions of the prototypes to compare and see the evolution.