Designing for Mobile Commerce

Designing for Mobile Commerce

Sam ShankCEO, HotelTonight

@samshank

Last-minute mobile hotel deals

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HotelTonight - 692 Days Ago

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HotelTonight - Now

• Top 10 travel app• Top rated hotel booking app• 6m downloads• 2500 top hotels• 100 Cities, 12 countries• 100+ employees• $35M in funding

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We compete on product quality

• Focused team• Mobile-only• No legacy systems• Analytics-driven

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Why does quality matter?

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Google SEM

Google SEO

Mobile Apps

Deep Pocket$ ✔ ✗ ✗Make Algo Happy ✔ ✔ ✗Make Users Happy ✗ ✗ ✔

This is great news for mobile startups

What makes a great mobile company?

#1 Simple & Focused

• 5 word simplicity– HotelTonight - Book last-minute hotel deals– Uber - Hail a car– Runkeeper – Measure my workouts– Grubhub – Order food– Postagram – Turn photos into postcards– Will Call – buy last-minute tickets– Coaster – skip the bar line

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Book a hotel in 3 taps and a swipe

#2 Efficient Task Completion

HT vs. Legacy Travel Website Apps

• Tap

PricelineHotels.com

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20

40

60

80

100

120 4 taps 8 seconds

52 taps 102 seconds

40 taps 109 seconds

• On-brand, proprietary & mobile-optimized

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#3 Superb Merchandising

• It’s a marketing expense

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#4: Great Customer Support

• Rates equal or better than anywhere

• Eliminate the need for price comparison

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#5: Pricing you can Trust

• Entertain, don’t just process transactions

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#6: Easter Eggs

Design problems & solutions

Improving Multi-Night Bookings

• Problem: booking 2+ nights was tedious

• No way to see availability across all hotels


• Had to individually check each hotel

• Livable with 3 hotels, inadequate with 9+


• Solution: Move night-selector to city page

• Result: Increase nights/booking by 20%


• New problem: Make hotel page UX consistent with city page


• Solution: Move nights control to top right.

• New Problem: Share button too prominent


• Solution: Look at usage data: only .04% of visitors to page shared it. Remove the button.

Improving Check Out Process

• Problem: 3-taps to book led to “fat finger bookings” who claimed they booked accidentally

• .2% incidence rate caused 4% impact to profits


• Solution: New page that required customer to enter initials

• Result: fat-finger complaints dropped to .01%

• New Problem: 2% drop in conversion rate. Felt “bureaucratic”


• Solution: Replace initials with “h-bed trace”

• Result: 5% improvement to conversion rate. Delighted customers

• New Problem: .1% didn’t realize they needed to complete page


• Solution: Move instructions above bed and brighten animation. On previous page, change button label from “Confirm Booking” to “Continue”

• Result: non-completion rate reduced by 75%

Design iterations on checkout

Build Great Things

Technology

Designing for Mobile Commerce