CREWFARE
Case Study
Role
UX/UI Design
Team
Dalena L.
Mason M.
Reese C.
Kathie C.
Jeritza D.
My Contributions
Competitor + Comparative Analysis
User Flow
User Interviews + Synthesis
Usability Testing
Journey Map
Design Sketches + Wireframes
Prototyping
Overview
Crewfare is a customizable group travel booking platform that offers a streamlined experience for purchasing lodging, transportation, and merchandise for large events.
Our team of 5 designers was provided access to existing style guides, conversations with the company’s main designer, and access to customers for surveys and user interviews.
Challenge
The scope of work tasked us with designing mobile responsive features for groups of “crew members” to split payments, payment status trackers, and reservation management tools.
Background
Crewfare is a group travel booking platform that specializes in a streamlined booking group experience in one place for events. Our team of 5 designers was provided access to existing style guides, conversations with the company’s main designer, and access to customers for surveys and user interviews.
Heuristic Evaluation + Site Audit
Crewfare’s current live website was audited to identify the most common pathways for the intended audience. The most common pathway, which includes booking rooms and event add-ons was diagrammed to communicate to stakeholders how real users experience their website.
Competitive + Comparative Analysis
Two separate analysis for split payment and managing reservations were conducted.
Split Payment
Other split payment options found in other apps include splitting by percentage, share or “weights”.
Managing Reservation
Many competitors display more filtering options, such as by guest ratings, algorithmic recommendations, and human curation.
User Research Interview
We sent out a survey to target audience members and interviewed 17 current customers to discover pain points and preferences relating to split payments and managing group travel.
“We pay for all split costs after the trip is over.”
A few user quotes:
“I’m only going to pay what I owe.”
“Splitting the bill is ideal since it eradicates the pay back process between us.”
“We operate as a group by paying for what you ordered not as a full group.”
Key Insights
Pain Points
Tracking people down for payments
Fronting money
Manually calculating costs
Split Payment Preferences
Some people prefer splitting costs evenly
Some prefer paying only their own portions
Pay Back Preferences
Options in how to split bills
Transparency in what is being paid for
Personas
Based on synthesized data from surveys and user interviews, we determined 2 main types of users to help design for the aggregate of Crewfare’s user base.
Jenna
”The Planner”
Needs
Prompts for her friends to take responsibility for their purchases
Effective tools for divvying up expenses
Reminders for friends to reimburse her without her needing to ask them outright
Pain Points
Takes on responsibility for planning the trip and calculating expenses
Constantly needs to remind friends that she fronted shared bills
Henry
”The Forgetful Friend”
Needs
Reminders that he owes money
Tools to contribute feedback to group plans
Pain Points
Often forgets to reimburse his friends for purchases they made as a group
Loses track of what he owe friends which sometimes lead to arguments
Does not have as stable income and sometimes can’t make payments on time.
Journey Map
To represent a situation our personas may encounter and how their paths cross as well as to better help us identify the key spots users could run into pain points.
Key Insights:
The main design opportunity lied in avoiding the situation in having to send a reminder for friends to pay them back, which could be an awkward social interaction no matter how close they are.
Challenge
Based on the personas, Jenna, the Planners, have no way of holding others accountable for their respective expenses or reminding them.
For forgetful crew members like Henry, they have no easy way to assist the planner and take financial responsibility.
How might we…
enable all group members to be held financially accountable to ease the role of the “planner” in managing expenses?
In support of the Planners…
HMW provide a way for group members to take accountability and ensure reimbursement within the group?
In support of the forgetful crew members,
Low-Fidelity Sketches
Our preliminary ideas explored how users can assign certain guests to pay for specific items on the reservation, redistribute funds after a friend drops out, and manage guest participation.
Payment Management Wireframes
Split Payment Explorations
Feature includes splitting equally, by weight/share (for example, one person paying for their partner for a shared room with other friends), and by custom amounts.
Payment Management Features
Toggle button to indicate the type of split option
“Add Friend” button to designate crew to specified rooms/add-ons
“Custom” split toggle takes you to a slide-up screen showing how you want to split – the price automatically calculates the remaining funds.
Managing Reservation Wireframes
Managing Reservation Redesign: Guests
Users had trouble finding specific information due to high information density on some screens and incomplete information on others.
We added pertinent information so that trip planners would have intuitive access to payment status monitoring and a “Send Reminder” button.
Managing Reservation Redesign: Add-Ons
Many Crewfare experiences offer complicated additional “Add-On” purchases. We designed new visual cues so that customers will know which “Add-Ons” were included, along with the exact prices, taxes, and fees.
Usability Test
V2.0 Results
Using Maze, a usability testing platform, 11 participants completed 6 tasks for booking and 6 tasks for managing reservations with our new features in place.
Splitting the cost of a room using “Custom Split”, which allows each crew member to pay a specific amount was the source of the most difficulty, with only a 70% success rate.
Overall, users were able to complete a majority of tasks with a success rate of 80% or more.
Add-On Experience
Split Payment Experience
High Fidelity Prototype
Walkthrough of prototype was presented to Crewfare stakeholders.
Add Crew Members in Initial Booking Process
Designating Crew to rooms with different split pay options
Manage Reservation: Send Reminder
Manage Reservation: Replace Guest
Manage Reservation: Remove Guest
Manage Reservation: Edit rooms, add-ons, and update
Solution Statement
Planners no longer have to front the money when planning for group travel and are able to send reminders without the usual social awkwardness this interaction usually brings.
Crew members can assist the Planner by paying their portion within the time limit so that they no longer are in debt and are being constantly reminded to pay back.
Next Steps
Working with a client and in a team, we were able to complete our scope of work and provided usability feedback on Crewfare’s original website.
The newly designed features will be updated to their site in the near future.
I plan to explore how mechanisms like this split payment experience not add more shame and social awkwardness to friend groups in emotionally difficult situations.
I would like to imagine new interaction models for customers to adjust split percentages intuitively, such as rotating (gyroscope) their phones, smart watch integration, and using color to anonymize payment assignment.