It's not a joke, we really did. It was intense, but absolutely worth it. Many learnings happened, and something awesome came out from all of it.
The old app was in dire need of a makeover. Not only visually, but the code architecture as well. So our team decided to try and invest a bit of time and come up with an MVP of a completely new vision for the app and then see how it goes. In which, we came up with the following mission statement for our project:
We didn't want just to make our new app look pretty. We need the redesign to be meaningful and actually improve on the user experience.
Upon researching, we discovered that our core user group like to explore their options more than just going straight to perform a booking, unlike the website. Hence, we wanted to go for larger inspirational visuals and larger affordances for them to go down the funnel and explore more about the hotels that captured their interests.
In the beginning, of the process we wanted to incorporate the exercises of design sprints and held multiple sessions of design sprints covering different parts of the app.
Our goal wasn't only just to make usability great for the users but also provide meaningful touchpoints for users to understand our product and what they can do. Take the "dealform" for example, depending on where and how you scroll it will react accordingly to not just show how it works but also assist if you need to change their dates or destination.
Another topic that gets me excited. What I wanted to explore more for the redesign was to not provide helpful microinteractions that help users understand their actions but also these moments of delightfulness that enrich the experience. By being more playful with simple actions, we can not only connect with users more but also emotionally engage with them as well.
No one likes accepting dramatic changes to things they were comfortable with, but with the new design we saw an increase in interactions and indications that users are exploring more options and finding more relevant information to their needs which results in better business metrics. Our stakeholders were of course, happy to hear this.
To ensure that we have a user-centric product, many of the design decisions were the results from research and user tests that were a close collaboration between the design team and our in-house user research team.
We've received recognitions from Best Travel App of the Year by popular Brazilian tech blog Canaltech to Google Playstore Editor's Choice. And this has only been the first step! There are many more exciting plans to come.
Check out this video on our team talking about whole the journey here!
(I was unfortunately on vacation when they taped it, so couldn't make it in the cut...)