New Business Model

Launching an experiment for a New Business Model

Reducing the onboarding experience drop off rates at Love Home Swap by incorporating a New Business Model and crafting an engaging acquisition funnel that balances user experience, business needs, and technical constraints.

My contribution

I led the UX/UI design for Live Home Swapping’s new business model, focusing on reducing acquisition funnel drop-offs while maintaining platform quality. Collaborating with stakeholders, I created user-friendly flows, ran workshops to ideate solutions, and crafted low-fidelity prototypes for iterative testing. I also worked on developing a scalable user journey that minimized the technical complexity of the changes, ensuring a seamless implementation.

The problem

HMW increase our conversion rates from 0.6% to 1% and double our member base?

The target audience

New Potential Users who are considering swapping holiday homes.

A little bit of context

LHS was a globally known Home exchange platform

It offers its members the possibility to swap numerous times in a yearly subscription with the option to do it either by Classic Swaps (Think about the movie ‘The Holiday’) or by a non simultaneous Points swap.

Thousands of users but not enough revenue

Throughout the years LHS has attempted to change their Business Model in order to increase their member sign-up and conversion rate, and since 2019 we’ve kept a 2 week free trial model which has proven some growth. But it wasn’t enough, we were stuck at 0.6% conversion rate.

Users didn’t want to provide their card details so early

Swapping was a complicated concept for so most of our new users. Most would create accounts just to browse around and see the potential of Home Swapping. But the drop off rates where massive when they saw they needed to provide card details.

Some challenges we faced

More than just moving the card details page from the middle of the funnel

The main objective of the New Business model was to not have a free trial that required the user to input their card details. At a glance this felt like an easy task, but there was a lot of complexity on the experience and on the technical side of it.

The new model would result on the quality of homes from members dropping

By allowing more members to the platform without asking for their card details we were going to have low quality accounts created. Resulting on lower quality of houses listed on our platform. We needed to find a way to avoid this.

The process

From talking to potential users and looking at the metrics it was clear we had to try out a bold move on our new business model

From our acquisition funnel metrics, it was evident at which point of the flow we were having the most drop-offs. We were loosing a significant amount of users we would ask them for card details prior to them being able to browse the site.We ran some research on our users, and the general feel was that the concept of Home Swapping, although interesting, raised lots of questions and concerns on new users. Many wouldn’t feel comfortable to start a trial where they have to provide card details just to be able to see around.

We had 3 pain points we wanted to solve, so we brought different stakeholders from the business to brainstorm some potential ideas for the new model

The more we learned from the users on our research and talked with our stakeholders the more problems we found we wanted to solve. Whilst looking at the new business model we found out there were 2 pain points we had to look at:
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1. How could we prevent users to drop off from the acquisition flow and try to sign-up?
2. How can we make sure the new business model change won’t lower the quality of members visiting the website?
3. How can we educate our users about the points system and make it an essential part of the acquisition channel?

Scoping down and dividing the project in phases to launch the experiment on time

From the workshop we narrowed down to a few ideas on how to improve the overall experience considering the pain points previously listed. But we learned that the experiment was going to take some time to be set-up, therefore we had to make sure we keep the scope achievable.We decided to divide the experiment in 3 phases, and take our time to validate a few changes before changing other things.

Getting everyone hands on by providing low-fi wireframes and some user flows to work with

Considering the project was technically complex and this change would affect all areas of the business, from Marketing to Customer Service we defined all the journeys a new user would take in the New Business Model and I made a low-fidelity prototype.Giving both our stakeholders a clear sense of the changes that were coming and the developers a clear idea and an initial base to start planning the tech side.

Our users interact to make swaps, so we had to make their interactions seamless considering the experiment bias

Allowing trialists to access the platform without providing their card details meant that we had to take care of different user journeys for different types of users. To account for this we made sure that the experience of the home swappers prior to agreeing for a exchange was seamless.

We couldn’t launch without setting up new logic on our house inventory to avoid the quality of houses dropping down

Out of all the ideas we had to make sure we don’t lower the quality of house listings, we decided to go with the one that required less design effort, medium technical changes, but highest impact. Which was changing the logic and the criteria on how users would see other houses when they browse around.

We decided to only show listed houses for a limited amount of time if there was no interactions from the user, as well as making sure our current users wouldn’t be able to see the listings that at least had a minimum amount of effort uploading a minimum of 3 photos of their property.

Testing on a limited timeframe to validate a few assumptions

A series of unmoderated test were carried to validate specific changes through the journeys.In order to save time and get the real user feedback we wanted from the A/B test, we took some risk not testing the entire flow in a single user testing round.

After stakeholder sign off, we refined the flows and finalised the designs

Taking into consideration the experience that was originally signed off, we updated all the UI of the game to match Build Up’s identity. Due to time constraints we had to hand over the designs without any further user testing at this point.

Some lessons we learnt throughout the process

Because no design process goes that smoothly

Talk to the DEVs more! Make sure you understand well the technical complexity of a change in the UX early on. Especially if it’s an experiment.

Although we made adjustments on the process to make sure Developers had something to work with. It would have been valuable to have conversations earlier to understand the complexities and avoid trying to solve too many things at the same time.

Adapt along the way, there’s always a chance requirements change or projects to reprioritise

Just from user feedback and research we know projects change, but sometimes there will be business decisions, or policies that will require you do adapt your work.

We never saw the results, but we had some plans...

We carried on discovery work on other parts of our acquisition funnel

From the research we did for the New Business Model we learned users wanted to have a better idea of the swapping benefits prior to signing up. We had embarked on a discovery journey on How to improve this.

Whilst we looked into the experiment results and iterate we hoped to implement changes from previous discovery

We were expecting some learnings from the experiment and iterate on it, as well as bringing back to scope some of the ideas we left for phase 2.

We would’ve finished discovery and implemented any changes as well as any opportunities we had left for phase 2

We were hoping to exhaust all possible improvements to the Business Model before calling it a success or a failure.