Marie C. Cassandra

At agoda, one of the things I’m most proud of is the introduction of “What You See is What You Pay” pricing. Let me take you back to the Summer of ’16. Whoa – whoa – not THAT far back. Two Thousand and 16 that is. I’m not that old. I’ve recently joined agoda (Priceline’s SEAsia hotel booking brand) and am part of a radical shift in agoda from their previous data/metric based decision making to a more user experience shift in thinking (yes, still driven by data of course, but more wholistic). The agoda website at that time was a Frankenstein’s monster of winning AB tests slapped together with very little consideration for if or how it all fit together. It was ugly as sin. The Product Owners/Managers were almost entirely made of former business consultants / analysts. A whipsmart set of guys who managed via spreadsheets. I was the first new Product Owner in the new wave – coming with my UX centric, digital experience background. I was brought in to work on their app – since it needed to be re-built from scratch they decided it was a good test-bed to attempt user centric design.

So there we are – very close to the finish line with our beautiful new app that we believe strongly will revolutionize the existing school of thought – excited to launch and prove what we know in our hearts (and have data from other companies to support too of course) and show these business folks the power of product design. Then the CEO calls a meeting. He wants to know what we think about more transparant pricing. Again, as user centered design enthusiasts, we’re ALL about it. So he says – “OK great – then let’s do it in the app”. “Sure!” we say, “we’ll start planning V2”. “No, no,” he says “let’s include it in the launch”. Remember how I said we were almost at the finish line to launch? Well this is a MAJOR change to the booking flow and literally touches every page. Not the mention the amount of messaging we need to do to help the existing ago users understand the change. This will push back launch by at least a couple of months.

What follows next was a heated debate. Again, riding on our heads is the fact that we need to show that the improved design leads to increased gains – but we’re incredibly nervous about this new pricing scheme because by showing the total price including all taxes and fees the prices will appear higher. If it’s not abundantly clear, it could lead to a loss in bookings with comparison shopping users  thinking they’ve found a better price elsewhere, not realizing until the end of the transaction (or indeed possibly never making the connection at all) that the prices were the same (or better) on agoda. So while part of us wants to launch with it in to provide the absolute best user-focused product we can right out of the gate – we’re also incredibly nervous about introducing 2 very major changes at the same time and not being able to measure the impact of one versus the other.

In the end, we decided to delay launch and go for the gold. Since I was at the bleeding edge of this shift, agoda didn’t have dedicated UX designers or copy writers, so I put on those hats and set to the challenge in getting the messaging right. With of course the constraint of this being something hastily tacked on at the end. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

I’m proud to report that not only did we NOT see a booking dip at all (as always expected with any redesign), but we crushed our EOY KPI goals within a couple short months of launch. A huge win for UX driven product design. And if you go to agoda.com nowadays you can see how the POs & Designers hired after me picked up that torch and are tranforming the business. (Yes, including a real UX Research & Design team and designated Copy Writer).