SpotHero’s Power Booking
SpotHero’s most loyal users are commuters, those who park for work 3+ days a week at the same location for roughly the same times. In this project, we looked to simplify commuter’s lives while increasing repeat usage
Focus: UX Research | UI & UX Mobile Design
Year: 2017
My Role: Product Designer
Credits to: Product Manager - Angela Vitzthum , iOS engineer - Carl Hill-Popper
The Goal
In 2017 the average retention for a SpotHero customer was around 4 times a year. Most people do not think about the need of parking until they’re near their destination, and at that point drive around for the nearest parking. At the same time, we knew that our most loyal segment where commuters, those driving to the office 4+ times a week and paying for parking.
By building a feature that reminded frequent parkers (commuters) to buy all their parking needs at once, could we increase both average order value and purchase frequency?
Increase AOV
Increasing average order value could save on transaction fees of multiple small purchase, and increase spend per user.
Increase Purchase Frequency
We could increase usage of SpotHero, by decreasing the friction caused by booking SpotHero everyday for the same spot.
Increase Retention
By building a features specifically for our most loyal customer group, will they keep coming back? Can we make a behavioral change?
Discovery
Quantitative
Through looking out our own analytics on purchase behavior by segment (commuter, weeknight, weekend, airport, etc.) We found:
Commuters had the highest repeat usage. Yet, it was still at 5 times a year vs. our average 1 time a year.
Commuters were often booking via our Apps
Qualitative
By interviewing customers in our commuter group, we found:
Most are booking in the moment: when leaving for work, while driving, or upon approaching their everyday parking facility
Commuters may choose between public transit and driving from day to day.
When planning their commute, they don’t think further than 1 week in advance
Two Design Options
Through some iteration and collaboration among the squad of an iOS engineer, Android engineer, and Product manager, I came up with two unique flows to book. Was choosing the days you want parking for up front more valuable, or at checkout?
Power Booking Before Search
Power Booking before searching allows the user to compare by total cost of the week, and only see facilities available for each chosen day.
Power Booking At Checkout Only
Power Booking only at Checkout after the user chooses a spot was a fast way to put the feature out in the wild to see if it has legs.
While comparing these options with my product manager and engineering team members we concluded:
We don’t know that commuters will use this functionality if we build it, so we must approach the feature iteratively.
Checkout functionality was to exist in both flows, so building the checkout flow only was not a waste of engineering resources.
To properly display prices and availability in search results, we need to rearchitect our search service from our back-end monolith, which was a very big dependency.
As the team leaned towards building the day selection only at checkout, I asked “how will users feel about this”? Thus, turned to usability to find out, as well as gut check the product market fit as a whole.
We found that power booking at search was preferred, but only at checkout wasn’t a deterrent.
We tweaked language to clarify that this is multiple reservations on separate days, not one reservation across days.
We added pricing per day to clarify the total cost
As a result, we built with the idea of moving power booking to search in the long term, but for the first release to only allow power booking at checkout.
Final Design
Note: As of now, we haven’t iterated on the Power Booking Design to test before search vs checkout.
Results & Next Steps
Since launch we have found:
Power Booking has not gained popularity year over year, but does continue to attract high GMV users
Rental frequency of users slightly improved after using Power Booking
Users who have used Power Booking only once have shown a slightly greater rental frequency of rentals per month after the Power Booking, compared to rentals per month before the Power Booking
In general, rental frequency of the users after their first Power Booking is ~1.3X the rental frequency before they used a Power Booking
Purchase frequency of the users who have used Power Booking at least once dropped by ~50% after they stopped using Power Bookings
The stickability of Power Booking is on the lower side, where only 35% of the subsequent rentals within 12 months after the first Power Booking were made using Power Booking again
We need to still
Compare at the experience of adding power booking at search to the current experience at checkout
Compare to Monthly parking, which is better for Customers and SpotHero
Follow up on usability findings, that those who commit to using SpotHero for their parking needs everyday, expect some sort of deal.