Shopfronts for Travel Creators
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Product Strategy. User Research. UX Design. Prototyping. Specifications.
Shopfronts allows travel creators to monetize their existing travel content, expertise and reach all in a single place. Their followers can discover and book recommended products by creators - ranging from accomodation to experiences and outfits, with exclusive offers rates. When they book, the creators earn a commission.
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Creators today hold undeniable influence on consumer spending across industries, especially travel. However they don’t have access to the tools needed to build a sustainable income, relying heavily on one-off, transactional brand deals.
Additionally, creator-led shopping has boomed in the last 2 years, with the introduction and growth of platforms like LTK, Instagram Shops and Amazon Inspire.
Travis wanted to design a platform empowering travel creators to earn from their content and expertise. As CPO, I worked closely with the CEO and CTO to define the vision, then led the design and delivery of the MVP within 6 months.
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[1] User Research
I designed and conducted user research - through 1-1 virtual sessions with 25 creators, and an online survey completed by 512 creators.
The objective was to identify their most pressing unmet needs and challenges in being financially sustainable as a creator, to inform the design of the Shopfronts.
A few insights emerged:
1 in 2 creators wanted to become full-time in 12 months, yet just 15% were monetizing regularly.
Creators are actively looking for new ways to monetize their content - not create more content.
Creators who have tried affiliate marketing platforms find them clunky and hard to use
There was a need for a simple way for creators to earn through travel content and expertise they already had.
[2] Design & Prototype
3 different approaches and options were designed for the Shopfront:
Shopping-led
Conversation-led
Personalization-led
Ultimately, the product was designed to empower creators to establish a new recurring, passive income stream, from existing content and reach. So we’ve decided on option 1 - Monetization model. This includes enabling creators to:
⚡️ Search for brands to earn from
⚡️ Add hotels to Shopfront
⚡️ Share Shopfront via a single link
⚡️ Earn a commission when followers book
⚡️ Access Shopfront analytics
I led a team of designers through this while working hand-in-hand with engineers to assess technical feasibility and constraints requiring design refinements.
[3] Build & launch
I conducted thorough research on a number of technical and integration solutions, to evaluate against complexity of integration and cost and determine the best solution for us.
I oversaw the development process working closely with CTO and engineers to ensure quality product performance, and prioritize features where needed. I was also closely involved with launch marketing.
[4] Continuous Optimisation
Once the product was launched, I built a no-code internal dashboard to bring together our various sources of data, into a single user analytics view.
We tracked analytics weekly, and took a fortnightly approach to reviewing and setting experiments to optimise different parts of the product.
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Shopfronts are now used by travel creators from 20,000 to 1,000,000 followers.
Through optimization experiments, we’ve achieved 10x growth in the number of hotels added within 6 weeks, and +275% increase in bookings in 3 weeks.
Role
Product Strategy ~
User Research ~
UX Design ~
Prototyping ~
Specifications ~
Product Strategy ~ User Research ~ UX Design ~ Prototyping ~ Specifications ~
Details
Approach 1/3 - Shopping-led (Chosen)
One key features of Travis is to let Creators create offers by mixing multiple products together for a discount for their followers. We simplify the process of combining multiple product categories, location and different pricing units, so Creators can simply create offers by searching and adding different products together, while the screen will automatically calculate the maximum amount of discount can be given.
Approach 2/3 - Personalization-led
We found that Travel Creators have extra services they want to provide their followers where Travis might not have the necessary categories yet. This is one reason Creators like to use Linktree because of its flexibility.
To better support them, we’ve released a section for them to quickly create featured links. Since these links are flexible, we also let them choose from a range of icons that serves most usecases while adherering to Travis’ branding. Lastly to reduce scrolling before seeing their products, horizontal formatting was used.
Approach 3/3 - Conversation-led
One key features of Travis is to let Creators create offers by mixing multiple products together for a discount for their followers. We simplify the process of combining multiple product categories, location and different pricing units, so Creators can simply create offers by searching and adding different products together, while the screen will automatically calculate the maximum amount of discount can be given.
Featured Links
We found that Travel Creators have extra services they want to provide their followers where Travis might not have the necessary categories yet. This is one reason Creators like to use Linktree because of its flexibility.
To better support them, we’ve released a section for them to quickly create featured links. Since these links are flexible, we also let them choose from a range of icons that serves most usecases while adherering to Travis’ branding. Lastly to reduce scrolling before seeing their products, horizontal formatting was used.
Create offers
One key features of Travis is to let Creators create offers by mixing multiple products together for a discount for their followers. We simplify the process of combining multiple product categories, location and different pricing units, so Creators can simply create offers by searching and adding different products together, while the screen will automatically calculate the maximum amount of discount can be given.
Add product
Creators simply have no time to spent on uploading photos on a new app. Our first version allowed users to upload their photos from their laptops only, upon research (mostly 1 on 1 and Typeforms), we found that their photos often resides on phones and their devices are in different operating systems, which makes transferring files a nightmare. Based on this feedback, we improved it enabling upload via mobile and connecting to their instagram account. This allowed them to import already edited images from instagram directly onto Travis, greatly improving usability and feedback.
Insights
To quickly test this feature, we’ve created an insight dashboard via the platform Glide. Connecting their information to a Google Sheet where it updates hourly including number of bookings, booking value and most recent bookings. This allowed us to quickly gather feedback, iterate on our designs and users requirement before deploying effort in building the full dashboard. This prototype has achieved a 85% weekly usage.
