Traveloka, initially a travel utility provider focused on mobility since 2012, expanded to include lifestyle needs with the Xperience product by 2019. However, a year after its launch, the product underperformed due to user confusion over its usage, leading to low Visit to Issuance conversion rates and an increase in costly customer service inquiries.
To address these issues, our design challenge is simplifying the Xperience product's navigation to enhance user discovery and decision-making. We aim to improve how information is presented to preempt user confusion and assist them in finding what they need, ultimately boosting conversion rates and reducing customer service costs.
Traveloka is Southeast Asia’s travel and lifestyle app that provides its customers with access to discover and purchase different types of travel needs. Its product portfolio includes transport booking services such as flight tickets, buses, trains, car rentals, airport transfers, and access to SEA's largest accommodation inventory. By the time I worked on this project Traveloka had about 40 million monthly active users across Southeast Asia.
This project taught me the importance of integrating past design learnings and contextual understanding, which enabled us to build on existing foundations rather than starting from scratch, thereby optimizing our design efforts.
User Journey Mapping & Studying Past User Research Report
The project team reviewed past research conducted by other Xperience designers to better understand user behaviors and needs across different sub-product categories including Attractions, Tours, Beauty and Spa, Activities (Sport & Entertainment), and Events.
I then mapped out user journeys for each category and conducted interviews with both "super users" and those who decided not to go through with their purchases. This exercise aimed to foster empathy within our team and among stakeholders, revealing that users have varying information needs at different stages of the product funnel (Searching, Browsing, Buying) and across sub-categories, which will influence our subsequent improvement recommendations.
Stakeholders Interview
I conducted interviews with Business Strategists and Product Managers across various sub-product categories within the Xperience product umbrella to gain insights into the business direction for the upcoming half-year. These discussions helped me understand the focus areas for product inventory suppliers, the product sub-categories the team wanted to invest more in, and the challenges the organization were facing in business expansion.
Traveloka Xperience product consists of multiple sub-product categories, so we tried to map out the user journey for each of the sub-product category, which are Attractions, Tours, Activities (Sport & Entertainment), Events, Beauty & Spa. This exercise was done to build empathy among the core project team and the stakeholders. From this exercise, we learned that users have different needs in the kind of information they look for in each sub-category before making their purchases, this affected the team’s decision in improving the recommendation product flow.
We presented the Heuristic Analysis result to the stakeholders based on sub-product category and general product funnel. We presented the design with the highest level of severity of usability problems to the lowest. We also mentioned what were the heuristic principles being violated in the presentation. The user journey mapping exercise conducted earlier also gave us better understanding on the sub-product category context and what usability and functionality problems the users were facing in accordance to the context.
Product Improvement Recommendation
Based on the Heuristic Analysis result, I came up with insights and improvement recommendations. The product improvement recommendations I proposed to the stakeholders were mainly revolving in the area of making a contextualized information based on deciding factors for the users. Some of the idea to promote contextualization of the information as well as enablement of flexibility in the product pages that are content-heavy was by having a “modular” section that later can be configured according to the needs and context of each sub-category of the product.
Product Flow & Information Architecture Workshop
The team then decided to have a workshop to determine the appropriate Information Architecture. The workshop was facilitated by the core project team (me as the project lead and the 3 other designers) and involving multiple stakeholders from product managers, engineers, market management team, content management team, as well as product marketing team.The result from the heuristic evaluation as well as the workshop was then being used to inform the creation of Xperience product roadmap led by the Product Managers throughout the whole year.
The information in each sub-category product page resulted from the workshop helped the team to plan product roadmap throughout the year.(high resolution image can’t be shown due to confidentiality of the information
The collaborative effort in redefining Traveloka's information architecture not only improved user satisfaction but also empowered our team to effectively influence the product roadmap, marking a pivotal shift in how we approach product development.
I learned several valuable lessons from working on this project:
Valuing Past Designs
Rather than dismissing previous designs outright, I learned the importance of understanding the context and considerations from past designers. This approach prevented unnecessary redesigns and increased our efficiency by building on existing foundations.
System Thinking and Scalability
Conducting a design audit on a complex product with multiple sub-categories enhanced my system thinking. It taught me to design for scalability and consider how changes in one sub-category might affect others and the product's future development.
Influencing the Product Roadmap
Working with my teammates, I gained experience in using a design thinking approach to initiate discussions and influence the product roadmap. This involvement boosted my confidence in engaging with business stakeholders from early stages.