Boost is a program offered to Premier Partners that gives vacation rental owners and managers the flexibility to improve where a listing shows up in search results. With Boost, power-ups are earned every time a booking is accepted on the HomeAway (Vrbo) platform.

With research-backed data, expertise, and guidance from product management, I was able to help build and guide a product that was not only powerful for owners to increase their booking revenue but easy to use.

YEAR

November 2017 - February 2020

MY ROLE

Lead Product Designer
Sr. Product Design Manager

Success metrics captured after launch

Over 1M boosted nights five months after launch in August 2018.

300k boosted dates overall.

The total rental amount for owners was 87M.

HomeAway (Vrbo) netted 6M in revenue.

PROBLEM

HomeAway was in a transition to move away from a subscription model to a commission model. The ability for owners to buy platinum subscriptions which ensure top search positions was no longer going to be available to owners and property managers. Existing owners and new owners alike needed a way to compete in our competitive marketplace. How might we enable Premier Partners to increase their search position?

By allowing Premier Partners to increase their commission on selected dates they can boost their search position.

PROCESS

Working with a researcher and product manager, I started to build out an initial tool that would allow owners to increase their commission on selected dates so we could validate and get feedback on the concept. I initially created the entry point within MarketMaker because it already had the infrastructure for the ability to view and select dates with market data.

Key takeaways & detailed findings

MarketMaker entry point into Accelerator - Pop-out menu when data range selected: option “Accept and adjust” is unclear.
Accelerator options “set one” and “day-by-day” commissions are unclear.
Competitor information is unclear.

There may be cases when boosting search position would be beneficial.
Most owners thought to modify their rates before boosting their search position.
Some owners didn’t like the idea of paying more commission to HomeAway.

STRATEGY

Further brainstorming would spark change to the concept Accelerator. Instead of only increasing commission to increase search position, we had come up with a new concept of a point system. This system would be based on accepting bookings. For every booking, credits would be awarded. In turn, an owner could use those credits to reduce the amount of commission it would take to boost selected dates.

Key takeaways from usability studies

1

Most partners in the study understood the general concept of search position.

2

All partners in the study preferred the term points instead of credits.

3

All partners resonated with the name Boost over accelerator.

4

Partners were able to interpret search position and use Boost.

5

Boost should only be used with power-ups earned instead of commission.

PIVOT

Further research was conducted by Dowe Johnston Insights. Two focus groups in two major cities were conducted to validate the concept of Accelerator. One of the major learnings we gained from this research was asking for commissions could have a negative impact on trust and sentiment towards HomeAway. Our product marketing team also surveyed our owners about what term resonated with them more when thinking about increasing their search position. Boost resonated with the majority of owners, also confirming research findings conducted by our research team in previous studies.

BOOST AT SCALE

After the launch, I guided my team to create the Boost experience for our property manager segment. The challenge with this segment is the number of properties they managed. More properties require different solutions like bulk editing. My team built out mock-ups for all screens and interactions for the property management experience. We worked in tandem with the development team to iterate on workflows. We had a soft launch for property managers in limited markets to get feedback faster.

CONTINUOUS DISCOVERY

I helped guide my team to start analyzing Boost feedback and page analytics. The only access point for Boost was through MarketMaker, and not all owners used MarketMaker. The owners who did had difficulty discovering Boost. The owners who found Boost struggled to complete a Boost. I facilitated a brainstorming session with this feedback and helped the team create how might we statements. We created two how might we statements based on two major themes. I empowered my team to brainstorm and come up with solutions to address these two themes.

How might we provide coaching to owners so they can be successful with Boost?

Provide a quick contextual tour for first-time users with an intro video explaining the Boost concept. The video was created by our in-house video team. We had the video and the contextual tour tested and owners validated the video and the tour helped them better understand Boost.

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How might we increase owner engagement?

Creating a permanent Boost widget on the most heavily visited page helped increase engagement to the Boost experience. Also, feed cards would cycle through the feed to act as intro reminders to the benefits of Boost and show owners how many power-ups they had to use. Our team was guided by the hook model, positive feedback loops were created to enforce the positive impact Boost had on booking and revenue when used.

i.e. I boost nights and get a booking, awesome. Show that to owners in a feedcard.

In order for Boost to be self-sustainable, a date-picker was needed. My team built a date picker showing days unavailable to Boost, days already boosted, and avg. search position for each day.

The native apps were built on the React platform. With the help of our design technologist, my team was able to help our engineering team save time on the build.

Credit:
Amber Koelzer (UX), Garret Hope (PM), Dr. Anikó Sándor (Research), Geoffrey Canady (Design Technologist), Clarice Bajkowski (Marketing Design), Shannon Parks (Product Marketing), the VRBO video team, the Boost engineering team, and more.

Thanks for stopping by. Get in touch if you want to chat.

Boost