Launching Chalets+ at Almosafer
Background
At the height of the global pandemic, countries closed their borders, people stayed at home, and international travel came to a standstill. The team at Almosafer - the largest digital flights and hotels product in the Middle East - saw engagement across their web and mobile platforms go to zero. As a business, it became imperative to innovate and find new and sustainable sources of income.
In Saudi Arabia, friends, close family and extended family met up consistently to spend valuable time with each other. The cultural and religious values of the people of Saudi Arabia did not particularly encourage hosting friends at home as privacy was a non-negotiable. Many homeowners and landlords who owned Chalets and Istirahas organised their properties to host people. The result was a thriving offline business where guests visited different properties owned by hosts, evaluating which fit their needs before ultimately booking one.
At Almosafer, it became clear through our continuous discovery efforts that several of our customers were booking Chalets and Istirahas, given that travel was impossible during the global pandemic. With over 5 million app downloads, 100 million site visitors, and 2.5 million registered users, providing Chalets and Istirahas as alternative accommodation on the platform could be a viable business opportunity and potential revenue source.
Understanding hosts
The first part of any user-centred design process is understanding the users. I led the efforts to understand hosts and guests' motivations, barriers, and pain points. While I didn't actively interview research participants (due to language barriers), I developed the research framework, defined themes for investigation, and identified the ideal research participant. Finally, as part of a continuous discovery process, I synthesised findings from our research into an opportunity-solution tree. The opportunity-solution tree was critical in narrowing down the specific problems the team chose to solve for guests and hosts.
For hosts, generating bookings for their properties was hard. Hosts relied on social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Google) to generate leads. It was hard to communicate the unique features of their properties, and they also had to be available for guest viewings.
Developing and validating solutions
With enough clarity around the problem space as it affects host and guest, I created story maps in Miro to visualise how we might solve the identified problems. Consequently, I held an assumption mapping session with the team to elicit underlying assumptions embedded in our story maps. To validate our assumptions, I collaborated with the product and design team using an experimentation framework that articulated our assumptions, our plan for validation, and our measure of success.
I worked with the UX designer on the team to prepare low-fidelity prototypes in Figma to validate our assumptions with hosts and guests. I went through multiple rounds of solution validation with hosts and guests. Each round offered new learnings that helped me iterate on the existing solution before ultimately arriving at the final solution to be built by our engineers.
Prioritisation and engaging stakeholders
Having developed a high degree of confidence around the problem space and validating our solution, the team moved on to the delivery phase of the product development lifecycle. I led a prioritisation exercise where I leaned on the entire product, design and engineering team to map out the full functionality we intended to deliver on an impact-effort matrix.
The outcome of this exercise was a product roadmap that established what features we planned to implement and in what order. In addition, I engaged product and business leaders across the organisation, sharing the problems we uncovered during discovery and how we were innovating to solve these problems.
Preparing high fidelity designs and prototypes
The initial set of wireframes I created was low-fidelity, which I used to validate the solution and ideas primarily. However, these are insufficient to help engineers understand what they need to build in code. I worked with my interaction designer to create a design system - a collection of styles, components and clear standards to guide the visual and interaction design of the various screens.
This design system was foundational in transforming the various screens from low-fidelity to high-fidelity.
Onboarding
The sourcing team at Almosafer captured most host property information offline to reduce the effort needed to register. As such, hosts' property information was already on the product when they logged in, and they only needed to activate their units.
After successfully signing in, hosts could define their language and display preferences before jumping into the product.
Activiating units
Activating units was a crucial step in the host's journey. To activate a unit, hosts had to review their property details (uploaded on their behalf), set the daily prices for their units, define their cancellation policy and manage availability.
Home
The home screen provided quick access to functionalities hosts needed to manage their units daily. Hosts could easily block days if they received bookings from other channels and adjust prices for any day in the future. Importantly, they could review upcoming bookings and contact the guest.
Booking details
The booking details experience gave hosts the details necessary to prepare their units for an upcoming guest booking. Hosts could directly rate their guests from the booking details screen for completed bookings.
Booking calendar
Hosts can also leverage the booking calendar to get a birds-eye view of upcoming bookings across their units. Hosts could see booked days, available days and blocked days. In addition, hosts could directly block specific days and adjust prices too.
Working with stakeholders
Design critiques with other designers
I facilitated design critiques to elicit feedback from the wider design team to deliver a great user experience to hosts and guests. I held design critiques at least once a month with 20+ designers from the various teams within the organisation.
Product reviews with executive leadership
I held monthly deep dives with product, design and business leaders. These sessions were invaluable for getting buy-in for our various ideas, sharing insights from our conversations with users, and getting more context about the business.
Handoff session with engineers
Working in an agile fashion, I led handoff sessions with our engineering teams to walk them through high-fidelity designs, various edge cases and error states. These handoff sessions happened as part of our sprint grooming, preparation and planning sessions.
Conclusion
Building Chalets+ was incredibly challenging yet truly rewarding. I learnt a lot about the people of Saudi Arabia and the travel industry. The host experience I designed was crucial in helping us onboard 200 hosts and activate 1,000 units in Riyadh and Jeddah in the first two months. While I moved on to another company, I'm proud of what I accomplished with my team as a UX Design Lead.