Ruslan Kreymer

01 INTRO

In this design case, I tell how I and the team have built the referral program for homeowners from scratch.

I tell the story of the product from initial idea to the final result from the design and product perspective.

My role for this project: UX & product design, research.

02 TEAM

Meet the team

I was part of a multidisciplinary team that was focused on properties acquisition and growth topics.

My team

Myself

Junior Designer

Product Manager

FE Developer

BE Developers

Copywriter

Data Scientist

External stakeholders

Legal

Pricing

Local managers

Product marketing managers

Customer support

Affiliate managers

Special thanks

For the experience, I got during the time I worked on this project I am especially thankful to Carlos Paz, the Product Manager. I learned a lot from him about driving products from scratch and scaling them globally.

03 CONTEXT

In this work, we focus on single-property owners, basically people that own and rent 1-2 properties. It might be an activity on the side or a primary source of income.

Property owners use extranet or Pulse app (or both) to manage the property.

04 QUESTIONS

Where it's started

It's all started with an idea. Why don't we build the properties referral program? I was sceptical initialy for the following reasons:

Why would someone refer a competitor?
Property owners are busy managing properties. They don't have time for things like a referral program.
How can we make sure we communicate it correctly?

and more..

At that time I worked on as designer on join.booking.com

05 RESEARCH

Let's ask

We asked the property owners (both in open discussion and via a survey) if they would refer others and also provided options for incentives.

30%

Around 30% of property owners said they would refer someone.

4/5

The majority of people said they want to have commission-free bookings as an incentive.

Proposed incentives: travel credit on Booking.com, commission-free bookings, free access to some of the paid features (property promotion, for example), personal advice and support via local manager, no incentive, other.

06 CHALLENGES

Challenges

Large system

Building a product from scratch within a large system.

User attention

Extranet is an extremely busy area and fighting for the user's attention there is a challenge.

Dependencies

Lots of dependencies with external stakeholders.

Scale

Localization difficulties and different legal requirements.

07 OPPORTUNITY

Week design sprint

The opportunity was clear to us so I organized the week-long design sprint where we came up with MVP. One of the outcomes was a touchpoints map.

08 COLLABORATION

Work as team

I believe that success can be achieved only if the team collaborates on all stages of the product.

Drive product vision together. Stand for the customer.

Copy

Brainstorm together from how we phrase the incentive of the program to CTAs labels.

Design

Follow and contribute to the design guidelines. Align to make sure there is a holistic picture of the entire product.

FE & BE

Talk to devs about data architecture, edge cases, potential limitations.

09 GOALS

Business goals

Open bookable

Number of properties that were referred and became open for reservation.

Referred properties

Number of succesfully referred prpoerties, the ones that accomodate at least one guest.

COA

Coast of acquisition per property per market.

Churn rate

Number of properties that leave the paltform within 3 months.

Active referrals

Partners that took an action and shared the link and there was at least one referral registered in our system.

Fraud rate

Close look for fraud cases and cases of abusing the program.

10 RESEARCH

Competitors

A similar program was in place in Airbnb, HomeAway. I took it for reference and went through the entire journey to understand how it's done there.

11 DESIGN

UI Design

The scope of work is huge, referral flow, email communication, landing, registration and onboarding experience are parts of the program.

I start the UI design with high level overview of the logical blocks. Indeed, I try to understand how those blocks migh transform based on the states or conditions.

I do a quick sketch of the UI taking into account the process, states, limitations we have.

Afterward, we discuss it with the team because then everyone sees how the ideas transform into tangible things. I am looking for the feedback.

When I collect the feedback from the team (for this project especially from the copywriter) I iterate on it.

As a next step, I bring the mockup to the critique session with other designers.

The previous steps ussually allow to come up with the strong UI case which is ready to be tested with users and in parallel development team can start working on implementation.

One of the very first iterations

One of the latest versions

Below you can see the final version of the design which went through an iterative process of optimization based on user interviews but not only. For example, the FAQs section is based on the most frequent questions that Customer Service was getting about the referral program, etc.

12 PROBLEMS

Lost referrals

Of course, there were issues. At the beginning of the program, we faced a technical issue that some of the referral links were not properly tracked and both referrer and referee did not get the incentive.

500+

More than 500 people were affected.

€ 1M

€ 1 000 000 incentives could be potentially lost and credibility of the program could be impacted.

Good collaboration allowed us to solve it.

BE developer traced back the logs and was able to figure out the referrers and referees
I designed the emails together with copywriter for communication of the issue and following steps
PO informed the CS about the next steps

13 INSIGHTS

Still up and running

After validation in 5 countries the program was successfully rolled out globally (almost in all countries).

14 RESULTS

Global exposure

At the moment I left Booking.com the property referral program was the second-biggest acquisition channel after direct one. And going far ahead paid channel.

It's still alive and it's amazing to see that things me and the team built are still working even if most of the team working in other places.