For some hosts, the point of entry is experiencing homestays abroad or govt encouragement to boost tourism. For many, point of entry is often casual - taking care of the family property or as a hobby or side hustle. As business picked up with stable income, hosts decided to invest full time.

We mapped out the positives and negatives for each of the competitor brands and compared them with our own. This helped us understand our weaknesses and opportunity areas. The two primary competitors are Airbnb and Booking.com.

Hosts look at Airbnb as the pioneer in alt acco. While it gets many things right, addressing India specific host issues is a challenge.

Booking.com is perceived as an additional platform for visibility and reach. Go-MMT is a popular Indian choice, however still to make a mark in alt acco.

Next, we noted down all the pain points/opportunity areas and used affinity mapping to identify focus areas. Lots of insights were gained based on the research and collected data with learnings on what key features, problems, challenges, and improvements could be made to reduce churn and also to improve the product's overall user experience. One of the most crucial focus area came up to be Rooms & Spaces - the idea was to consider each bedroom, bathroom, and other property areas (such as living room, kitchen, etc.) as private or shared spaces within the property.

Now that we had a direction, the product team started working on the requirement documents for various sections of the app. This was an iterative process - for each section, once the initial PRD was made, the entire team of design, product and dev would discuss and close them. Post that, each module was picked following the agile design sprint method where design process repeated itself till we reach a satisfactory solution. These solutions were approved from the leadership before they moved to the Development phase.

With the requirements ready, we started creating flows for the same. The user flows helped us cover all use-cases within a scenario. These were further extended to Information architecture which helped us define basic information flow in the module, and understand the sitemap and working of different sections. Again, once the IA was completed, it as discussed among product team and later with dev team as well - to check the technical feasibility/approach based on the tech stack being used.

After IA, we created low fidelity wireframes to propose new layouts based on initial research and learnings from INGO (we had to unlearn lot of our Ingo learnings and look from the shoes of Hosts, who are mostly NOT at the level of professional Hoteliers). The wireframes helped us better assess what functionalities, layout, and components of the module were working and what not based on cross-team discussions and quick UT sessions (need basis).

The final wireframes were then converted to high fidelity UI designs showcasing what different modules would look like and function.
We used first module to set the design language of the app. Since the app's inlet was in MakeMyTrip app itself, the design language was derived from the MakeMyTrip's library. The idea was to make users feel that they are in a special section of MakeMyTrip app - exclusive to hosting. Similar strategy was used for MyBiz section of MakeMyTrip - another exclusive B2B service within the app.

As soon as we finished UI of any module, we scheduled its UT session with 8-12 hosts (depending on availability). The hosts had healthy mix of demographics and experience. The methodology used was remote focus group discussion, where we would provide a demo of the prototype with a set flow and hypothesis in mind. We described the task to be performed and then prompted hosts at each screen to express how they would proceed on the presented screen, what are their thoughts, etc. Our points of interest were whenever they were stuck or shared their thoughts on what worked for them and what not.
Many notable insights came up during the various sessions. For example - a very minimal and clean approach will not work for such platforms, instead it is important to call out different sections and be loud about the persuasions. Another point was trust is key and we need to overcommunicate at times to make hosts feel informed.

Although we have been getting consistent business from the app, we still need to improve further. Our next steps are to identify the areas of improvement and work on them.

With the new hosts onboarding with daily, we decided to pick our property onboarding flow first for our UT - the longest and most important. The primary objective of the study was to understand the app interaction & experience with core focus on the onboarding journey: Identify pain points and areas of improvement/where assistance is required, optimisations toward making the process smoother and the hosts self-sufficient.  

Remote usability testing with show & tell on Zoom for this study with session not exceeding 60 minutes. We met a total of 12 hosts who were live on our app - First time alt acco hosts + offline hosts (4) Existing alt acco hosts (could be across portals) (8) .

We have started working on the current pain points for the next release of the app. The major focus areas will be "photos & videos" and "rooms & spaces" sections. To name few paint points - Hosts getting confused between the room level amenities and property level amenities, various restrictions and errors coming up while uploading photos, the not-so-smooth interaction of rearranging photos.

While the dev team is working on resolving the technical issues and finding work arounds for the limitations, my task is to improve the overall experience of the onboarding based on the insights received. I am also planning to utilize AB testing to validate ux around various sub sections of the onboarding flow.