Capturing friction at the point it happens and recommending solutions to improve user experience.
- B2C
- book process
- troubleshoot
- SMS
- verification
Situation
One of the first UX projects I worked on was an SMS phone number verification prompt during the booking process. It enables partners (ie. property owners who rent out their residence as a vacation rental) to verify the trustworthiness of potential guests.
We knew from data, guests who verify their phone number tend to cancel less frequently than those who don’t, meaning more completed bookings. It goes like this:
- Guest begins booking a property
- They’re asked to include their phone number
- A prompt appears asking them to verify their phone number with a code sent via SMS.
Guests are asked to input the SMS verification code
When tapping on “Need help?” they have some options
They can choose to report a problem
Over time we observed in some countries some users didn’t receive this verification code. We knew because they told us in the prompt when they selected “I can’t receive the code” and go on to fill out a small reoprt.
Task
When users sucessfully verify their phone numbers, partners businesses improve and therefore Booking.com’s. I was tasked with exploring ways to help guests complete their bookings and secure this revenue.
Action
The first thing I did was read through the reports that guests sent. A familar pattern emerged as to why guests didn’t receive the verification code:
- Phone is roaming
- Phone is on Wi-Fi / not using network
- Generally just didn’t receive code
I proposed a troubleshooting feature into the product and worked with my copywriter to ensure we covered the most common issues.
I also thought to keep it simple and first ask guests to double-check their phone number. We’re all human!
Result
When tapping “Troubleshoot problem” guests were shown some of the most common issues to help themselves resolve the missing verification code.
With our internal tools, we measured and tracked which of the suggestions guests were retrying to send the verification code from.
This helped improve the feature in the long run as some of this information could be provided earlier in the booking process.
I still wanted the last step to be submitting a report. This way guests can still tell us in detail what the issue was, feel like they got to express themselves, and we could learn what we could. From there, they could go on to continue their booking.
What I learned
As mentioned, this was one of the first UX projects I worked on. I learned a lot on this project, from “small things” like collaborating with a product manager for the first time, to considering highly technical edge cases, and reviewing user input to inform my decision making.