E-Commerce

StayVista. 97% increase in conversion rate from checkout to payment.

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Overview

People love to travel, and with digital technology shaping consumer behaviour, online platforms have become essential for trip planning. To stay ahead, StayVista, India’s largest holiday rental villa chain, partnered with us to transform its service design. Through extensive research (including a few group trips for insights), we identified the need for a refined search experience and features that simplify group decision-making.

Using design thinking, we addressed key challenges like user drop-offs and offline dependency. By optimizing every stage of the vacationer’s journey—from discovery to post-stay—we redefined how groups book holidays online. The result? A seamless, user-friendly platform where travellers can craft the perfect getaway!

Key takeaways

  1. Reimagining how people discover holiday rentals.

  2. Designing group experiences.

  3. Scripting new norms of transparency & trust.

  4. Charting a complete digital experience.

  5. Problem-solving via technology-enabled solutions.

01

Reimagining how people discover holiday rentals.

Our aim was for travellers to find villas that perfectly matched the kind of vacation they wished to take faster. So, we reimagined the search-process by introducing features like grouping ‘Collections’ of similar properties together, displaying amenities through icons instead of lists, creating an intuitive search-bar, and introducing nudges that help keep the user on course.

‘Collections’ were designed to help users skim through some of StayVista’s most widely-searched categories, and browse only those villas that are relevant to the kind of trip they’re planning.
The human brain perceives visual information much faster than text (Trafton 2014). Icons for amenities helped groups shortlist properties based on listing cards alone.
Overwhelmed by a large number of options, if the user isn’t taking the next step in the journey, the website detects it and gives the user a contextual nudge to personalise their search filters further.
An intuitive search bar that responds to the user’s needs.

02

Designing group experiences

Booking holiday villas online can be a cumbersome task, particularly when the booking involves larger groups with varied needs. To add to that, if the booking is taking place on a mobile screen, which lacks the freedom of easy toggling between multiple tabs, a clear visual design is essential. Based on our consumer research, we introduced some features that could facilitate remote decision-making, particularly for groups.

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Shortlist properties.
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Generate third-party shareable links.
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Compare top-voted properties.
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Vote for your favourite property.
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Being mindful of the human experience behind booking for a group, we introduced ‘per person split’ in pricing details.
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A nudge to indicate the way forward if the user is surpassing the maximum occupancy limit.
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Crossing out unavailable dates to simplify the journey and a nudge to indicate that the property might be cheaper on an alternate date.
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Highlighting available dates to simplify the search-process.
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If the website identifies that the user is not moving to the next page in the booking stage, it displays a timely nudge to secure the booking.

03

Scripting new norms of transparency & trust

Keeping in mind that the average ticketing price for StayVista properties is relatively high, it was essential to establish trust. We decided to deliver crucial information upfront in the listing cards as well as in the inside pages. This played a key role in reducing offline dependency.

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Details about availability of wifi and network.
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Details and tips about the anticipated travel.
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Displaying crucial information upfront ensured that users could make key eliminations at the discovery stage rather than the booking stage. In order to avoid customer dissonance, essential details like, ‘Cap on number of guests’, ‘Minimum 2 nights booking mandatory’ and ‘No. of people the pool can fit’ were provided upfront.
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Different dimensions of transparency like disclosure, clarity, accuracy, etc. foster trust (Tomlinson, EC, & Schnackenberg, A 2022). Transparency about the pros; but especially the cons contributes to fostering trust between the customer and business.
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A ‘last updated on’ tag on images for greater transparency.
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A ‘Vibe Check’ section where customers can access video footage provided by the property manager.
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An easily accessible communication channel with villa managers and attendants is provided within the website.
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A feature to offer housekeeping status at regular intervals.
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Details about villa managers and attendants are provided on each property's page.
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Information about available meal-packs are provided on each property's page.

04

Charting a complete digital experience

To reduce offline dependency, we introduced features like ‘pre-recorded voice note’, where villa managers can help users with last-mile directions, nudges that guide the user throughout the booking journey, and a booking modification feature that is easy to navigate making it a complete digital experience, up to and beyond the last mile.

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A contactless check-in link which includes the option to modify the booking is sent to each person visiting the property.
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To reduce offline dependency, we introduced the feature of a ‘pre-recorded voice note’ where villa managers can help users with last-mile directions. The voice note is provided to the user instantly after securing their booking.
Users can easily add meal-packs to their stay or include a wide range of 'experiences' in their package.
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Users can easily add meal-packs to their stay or include a wide range of 'experiences' in their package.

05

Problem-solving via technology-enabled solutions

Keeping the consumer needs in mind, the website building had a CSS-based approach with a well-structured design system and modular components. The entire technology focussed on improving page loading time, preparing for integration readiness and ensuring that the website performed well while providing a seamless experience across pages.

Enabling cross-platform integration

Since StayVista is a content-heavy website, the focus was on delivering a simple, clean and straightforward website without too many heavy animations and on-scroll interactions.

One of the strategies toward creating a website that loaded quickly was to rely heavily on CSS for most of the animations and interactions. We explored ways of using CSS instead of Java script for certain behaviours like tab-switching for which we would normally use Java script. Preferring CSS to Java script also helped reduce the First Contentful Paint time for the website.

We created a design system which offered a library of predefined, reusable components. This design system accelerated the pace of building the website and enhanced consistency platform-wide.

Reducing load-time

The front-end for the StayVista website was to be handed over to the client for integration. So, a lot of the development was driven toward creating robust components that wouldn’t break when integrated.

We created style-specific as well as behaviour-specific components which helped immensely in improving the overall quality and performance of the code. This also helped when a common behaviour needed to be changed across differently styled components.

Some components like the stay planner and the calendar component were quite complex and served as learning opportunities to extend our coding abilities.

References

  • Atkinson, MA, Simpson, AA & Cole, GG  2018, Visual attention and action: How cueing, direct mapping, and social interactions drive orienting,  Psychon Bull Rev, vol. 25, pp 1585-1605. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-017-1354-0

  • Trafton, A 2014, In the blink of an eye, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, viewed 8th December 2022,. https://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116

  • Mukherjee, N, Dicks, LV, Shackelford, GE. et al.2016,  Comparing groups versus individuals in decision making: a systematic review protocol. Environ Evidence, vol.5 DOI: 10.1186/s13750-016-0066-7

  • Britannica 2022, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. 'Gestalt psychology', Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., Chicago. https://www.britannica.com/science/Gestalt-psychology

  • Structured decision making 2013, Step 3: Alternatives, Structured decision making, viewed 8th December 2022,. https://www.structureddecisionmaking.org/steps/step3alternatives/

  • Tomlinson, EC, & Schnackenberg, A 2022, The effects of transparency perceptions on trustworthiness perceptions and trust, Journal of Trust Research, vol. 12, pp 1025. https://www.tandfonline.com/doicitedby/10.1080/21515581.2022.2060245?scroll=top&needAccess=true&role=tab