PRODUCT & SERVICE DESIGN
Overview
Designing a better online booking experience for moving services.
Moving is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 most stressful things in life. And as someone who has moved upwards of 20 times, designing a better flow for booking movers was a challenge that I could fully empathize with. I knew that it would be a stretch to make moving fun. But my aim was to at least…make it less stressful. So customers could focus on the more exciting things - like a new home or town.
Core Problem
The main flaw in the previous booking flow was relinquishing control over the most important price levers: Quantity of Movers and Move Length.
The flow was short and sweet, but incredibly dense. After interviewing customers & shadowing our concierge team, I started to understand that there was a major problem when customers booked their own moves. They weren’t really sure what they would need — and unlike a friendly conversation with our concierge staff, this flow heavily relied on users having an immaculate understanding of their job scope, which is really easy for the average person to underestimate.
If we opted to keep the POR and maintain a user’s control over these levers, we knew that it would do a few things:
It would continue to work against our recommendations for a successful move. When we knew a successful job could require more movers, more time, or more equipment preparation.
It would keep putting responsibility for the success of the move back onto the customer instead of the service.
It would also continue to give customers a false sense of “savings” by lowering the total cost, and perpetuate a “gaming the system” behavior that we wanted to avoid.
Short Term Goals
• Improving comprehension of the service offerings, payment model, and how it worked.
• Lower the percentage of users who edit the recommended move plan on the confirmation screen.
This was our final test in a series of 5—removing all obvious levers and ending the flow on a ML-based moving plan. This was the winning variant, and dramatically lowered the urge for customers to “game the system,” This led to an overall increase in both customer satisfaction and mover satisfaction!
A Whole New Booking Flow
As the experiments wrapped, I ran a Vision Workshop with key stakeholders to gather concerns with the current experience, set internal expectations, and foster feature ideation between orgs. The key takeaways were:
‣ Approach each move with a service mindset.
‣ Building Trust requires good communication and feedback.
‣ Personalized Move Preparation = Higher efficiency jobs.
Booking should be as simple as a quick chat.
Bellhops happened to employ an amazing Move Concierge team. They were exceptionally skilled at building customer relationships and were incredibly efficient in booking moves over the phone. I wanted this new booking flow to essentially function as another member of their team. It would follow a short, conversational script — each question could be answered in less than a minute.
To boost operational efficiency, I also wanted to integrate Maps APIs so that internal teams had immediate access to weather advisories, site photos, local permitting & parking limitations for both origin & destination locales.
This was a rough proof of concept from when we first started to develop the chapters of the questionnaire.