Bookable Pins
Roles: UX, UI, Prototyping
Type: 4 week Academic Case Study
Team: Jimmy Hsu, Aron Chen, Zhanna Krupinina, Anya Valueva, Tavan Sohi
Year: 2017
Overview
With Pinterest’s growing user base in searching for inspirations related to traveling, my team and I leveraged this opportunity to seamlessly implement Bookable pins. It is a new feature which will allow travel inspired users to book accommodations directly from the platform when seeking for ideas.
Role
As the team's interaction designer, I was in charge of creating an enjoyable end to end experience while aligning with Pinterest’s mission. I created high fidelity mockups, setting a visual design style, and prototype for user testing.
Challenge
Propsal
Our digital intervention initially addressed a business problem for hostels around the world, where there is a huge misconception of what a hostel is. Through the process, however, our idea converged on a proposed business partnership between accommodation businesses, no longer just hostels but hotels as well, and Pinterest to mutually benefit all parties.
We made Bookable Pins - a new feature integrated into Pinterest's current digital space. It is a way for travelers to book accommodations by offering a holistic travel planning experience within Pinterest's platform.
Opportunity: The booking journey
When we decided on this partnership, we did thorough research on why this would make sense, and the opportunity showed up. Users are already on the Pinterest platform because of its visual innovation, actionable insights, and relevant results that connect them with recommended brands through machine learning. Research from the Pinsights team also shows that the use of Pinterest for travel planning has become very popular.
In 2016, a study found that “three out of five Pinterest users use the platform to help them plan their travels – and those who do so are more detailed in their planning than non-users.”
– Deep Focus Intelligence Group
Everyday there is “an average of 2 million saves” that is related to travel and it is also “one of … [the] top 10 categories with a total of over 3 billion travel-related ideas.”
Leveraging this, the idea became much more realistic and aligned well with the Pinterest brand.
Brand insights
According to Pinterest, they strive to give users the inspiration they need to create a life they love. It is also a place where users can go to learn about their personal tastes and get the confidence to try new things. Their mission is to “help you discover and do what you love.”
“Our job is to help you discover ideas for yourself. Those ideas come from other people, but the objective is not to get a lot of followers or to impress others.
There are a lot of really valuable services that are always pushing you to communicate with other people. But there are few services that are about helping you be the person you want to be and fulfilling your ambitions.”
— Ben Silbermann, CEO and cofounder of Pinterest (2016)
Frame + Solution:
How might Pinterest bridge the digital and physical space to help existing users, who are using the platform for travel inspiration, in realizing their personal aspirations?
Through Pinterest, users can go beyond the discovering stage and be able to act upon it. This feature is our aligned interpretation of where the brand could be in the future.
“Our theory is that the more people who actually do things, those are the people that become the evangelists for the service. That’s born out in the research that we do, in the data. We’re always trying to focus on that, rather than just focusing on aggregate time spent.”
— Ben Silbermann, CEO and cofounder of Pinterest (2018)
Prototype
Mockups and workflows
Discovery Stage
Keyword Search
With the introduction of the new Bookable Pins feature, it was essential to figure out how it would live on the current platform. My team and I approached the discovering of bookable pins by implementing it naturally into search results which can be seen done on the food recipe pins. Once users search a keyword, a refined tab will be shown that will further narrow down results.
Refining Results
With a large number of pins scattered on Pinterest, we can narrow down options for traveling enthusiasts and provide them with relevant information. By enclosing information such as price under the "Refined" tab, users are reassured that results are within the parameters that they set.
Consideration Stage
One of the challenges in implementing bookable pins onto Pinterest is the difficulty of presenting enough information on one screen. Multiple design decisions helped me come up with the final design and that included:
Multiple-Room Support
Hotels and hostels always offer different room types, so I wanted to group these rooms together with a scrollable carousel to help businesses gain more visibility on the platform. This will also eliminate the need for users to look for other room types from the same company on the search page.
Room Information
Carrying over the idea of tabs from the existing comment and photo section, I created two simple categories to lower cognitive overhead when users are seeking for additional information.
Checking Availability
Separating the dates from the rest of the listing page through a call to action button allows users to focus on the available time while also giving a bigger surface to select.
Personalization
I decided to include an "Accommodations like this" section at the bottom, this will help leverage personalized recommendations to help users explore.
Booking Stage
In any sort of transaction, it will always require additional information from the users so, to lower the cognitive overhead of this experience, I wanted to spread it out as much as possible by including different design decisions to create an optimal flow.
Autofilling Information: With pre-existing data that users have used to create their Pinterest account, guest details can be filled in automatically to reduce additional data input.
Sectioning: Specific detail about the number of guests, check-in, and check-out dates are all collected earlier in the search process from either the Booking detail section or the Refine tab. This will reduce the booking process to create a simple flow for users to navigate.
Post-booking: When a booking is complete, users are prompt with a confirmation screen to reassure that the reservation has gone through. Though the booking may be made, the travel planning experience isn't over yet. To keep users engaged, I added a section at the bottom for users to create travel planning boards if they haven't done so already. This will help re-engage users and direct them back into the platform.
Design Process
Precedent study
Buyable Pins
With a mission to be the platform that assists the users in discovering and doing, Pinterest introduced a new “Buy It” feature in 2015 that would allow consumers to order products they see fit without having to click to another site. According to Shopify, 93% of Pinterest users use the platform to plan a purchase and 96% uses it to gather product information.
“I hope that people find things they want to buy and be part of their life. We will just take a lot of the work out of that. Before, you had to find a link and email it back to yourself, so I hope that now we can make that process easier.” – Ben Silbermann, CEO of Pinterest
Pinsights: Travel trends
Every year, Pinterest releases many data-driven trend reports across an abundant of categories that documents different searches and must tries. Documents such as travel are published to show what kind of experiences users are searching for when planning their trips. These statistics help provide suggestions for how brands can potentially better cater to their audience.
Below are some of the travel statistics for 2018 on Pinterest.
Pin.Pack.Go Four Seasons X Pinterest
In 2013, Four Seasons Hotels and Resort “leverages the power and popularity of Pinterest to connect guests with [their] local experts worldwide.” The brand understands that the thrill of traveling begins before arriving at their destination, so they wanted to engage travelers early on their trip planning process.
https://pursuitist.com/four-seasons-pin-pack-go-service-debuts-pinterest/
Experience map
I identified some critical customer frictions that travelers face when planning their travels. The interventions aimed to resolve these frictions by offering engaging touchpoints while minimizing cognitive overhead via good design. We identified 4 essential experience stages where we would address these frictions:
Information architecture
While my team and I developed the information architecture with the new "bookable pin feature," from accommodation discovery to post-checkout, we had a holistic look at the rest of the app and made sure that it seamlessly fit into the Pinterest platform. This mostly meant acknowledging when a user is planning their trip, connecting relevant recommendations, and having designated boards to reflect travel-related activities.
Visual design
When approaching the project, my team and I wanted to keep Pinterest’s style guide and their design language in mind to bring the design to life. One of the findings that we came across is their most recent redesign that showcases best practices for inclusivity. While analyzing the new UI and methods, certain aspects came to my attention, and that included increase color contrast, strong typographic hierarchy, and clear focus indicators without relying on colors.
For our new feature, Bookable Pins, I applied the same visual components throughout the experience to make it as cohesive as possible.
Reflection
Takeaways
Setting out to create an immersive experience when planning for travel, we leveraged Pinterest's visual capital to create the best travel planning experience on mobile. With a set time constraint, my team and I came up with an idea we are proud of, but with more time I want to work on the end to end experience.
End to End Experience
We focused a lot in the planning experience, but to live up to an ideal immersive travel experience platform, it is critical to consider users post experience. Post-booking is not the last step travelers will be doing since they haven't started the actual traveling part. I would like to implement a post-travel experience where boards will be automatically created based on the pictures taken with the users’ cellphone. This is important because after a vacation, most travelers feel the "post-vacation blues" and this will help them relive that experience while family and friends can also view it without users uploading it individually. This can also be expanded to other users who are searching for inspirations for their travel.
Thinking about real-world use cases
We created this feature where users can be able to have a more immersive experience when booking and planning their travels, but in the real world, most users may be using multiple platforms to plan their trip. This is a difficult problem to solve, but I think by creating a more human experience it will potentially become a platform where users can do the whole planning process on.