Revamping Flight details

How we increased product CR by reinventing the details page Information Architecture

Nov 14, 2022

Summary

Alibaba is the leading OTA and Travel company in Iran with 4M+ MAU. In April 2022 following the website redesign which I've written about in the Medium article Design Systems at Alibaba, In the International Flight team, we decided to simplify the choice for our users. We started discovery research and ultimately by optimizing the content and design increased the conversion rate for PLP to PAX step by 20% YoY.

Problem Definitions

From a top-down perspective, the business objective was to increase the conversion rate and also decrease call center costs. The overall plan was to make the choice easier for the user via a better assortment, especially for popular routes. Looking into analytics, we noticed that most users dropped in the details step (PDP).

And according to call reasons reports, we knew there were lots of problems with the current rules structure, So to get a better understanding of the existing issues and find the strategic points to make improvements, I came up with Design and Content strategies.

Design Strategy

Because each route type had different characteristics, we needed a segmented analysis of the funnel based on routes. So we divided routes based on their flight duration into Short-haul, Mid-haul, and Long-haul.

We also considered the search volume and device share of each segment in our analysis.

Based on analytics, our strategy was to make improvements in PLP (Mobile and Desktop) for Short-haul routes and in PDP (Desktop) for Mid-haul and Long-haul routes.

So I proposed the following action plan, And choosing conversion rates as our KPI, we set a goal for a 40% YoY growth in PLP to PAX conversions.

Collecting Data

Next, we decided to collect qualitative and quantitative data. We initially watched video recordings of our users’ behavior to find clues. We then reviewed reports from GA events to find out how much these issues scale in the product.

Content Strategy

At first, we guessed that the problem with the Rules tab was the navigation, resulting in unnecessary calls. But after investigating calls related to the Flight details and rules we realized most of these before-purchase calls were mainly because of the content and not its exposure or navigation.

So content of the rules became important to us.

We decided to improve the rules in 3 layers:

With PM’s advice, we formed a content committee consisting of Customer Care Specialists, Helpdesk Specialists, Customer Services QA Specialists, and Supply Specialists, and myself as the lead to revise the route-based rules and make them more helpful.

And because rules would vary between routes, I created a scalable process that we could reiterate for each route.

And to optimize the collaboration among the teams, I offered a model to distribute the efforts throughout the process based on roles, instead of traditional centralized brainstorming sessions:

So we started sampling and listening to customer calls with the research team. After synthesizing our findings, we specified each theme's importance based on the frequency of the calls. And ultimately we would check the refined rules with the rest of the team if needed.

The final results:

Detail Modal redesign

As the final act, we redesigned modal

Final Results

After successfully launching the new details, we increased the conversions by 30%.