Project Context
This was a freelance project undertaken at Traveloka. Traveloka is a leading online travel agency and lifestyle super app in Southeast Asia, offering a wide range of products like flights, hotels, buses, trains, car rentals, and local activities.
• Role: Design / UX Strategist
• Role: Design / UX Strategist
• Scope: UX strategy
• Timeline: 1 month (March - April 2024)
Background Context
Domino is a gamification designed to be implemented on TERA, Traveloka's B2B platform for hotel partner's management.
This is created as a performance management / incentive program to tackle hotel partner's inconsistent supply quality and customer service. By improving the quality of supply presented on Traveloka, the more value they can bring to their customers.
In the first phase the game mostly revolves around the two major criteria. Hotel partners gain their scores by lowering the disparity in their rates and inventory allocation.
While these could work as the “major task”, but relying on it as as the sole game mechanics would make the game too monotonous and too challenging.
Hence, for Domino Task, the goal is to explore other gamified tasks that might be able to give a sense of faster achievement and aligned with current score system.
Problem Framing
Based on the previous research, product and design team identified risks and challenges that could hinder the adoption and engagement of Domino:
External:
• Hotel's varying degrees of performance and conditions could affect their level of interest / participation
External:
• Hotel's varying degrees of performance and conditions could affect their level of interest / participation
• Hotels' lack of concern for price disparity (over other OTAs)
Internal:
• Domino's main mechanic requires a long process and huge investment from hotel partners
• Domino's main mechanic requires a long process and huge investment from hotel partners
• Rewards and benefits cannot be explicitly specified because its granting process involves a variety of factors
How might we design side tasks that make hotel partners strive for better product quality and customer service excellence, without over reliance on Traveloka's benefits?
Approach
To design the side tasks, the first step was listing the supply quality attributes (Price, Inventory, Content, Review, Check-in Problem) and its qualifiers to define the expected behavior from hotel partners.
This will be the basis of side activities and its definition of done.
Sense-making
I also assessed the level of effort needed (by hotel partners), degree of control and impact to Traveloka's business metrics to determine the value of each quality attribute and its side tasks.
I also assessed the level of effort needed (by hotel partners), degree of control and impact to Traveloka's business metrics to determine the value of each quality attribute and its side tasks.
• The higher the impact and effort needed, the higher the score,
• The degree of control serves as our guardrail (specifically in setting the tasks' timeframe and frequency) ensuring that side tasks remain achievable
Competitor Research
As part of research process, I reverse engineered existing incentive programs (on Traveloka and other competitors).
As part of research process, I reverse engineered existing incentive programs (on Traveloka and other competitors).
This process helped me in generating ideas on the leveling system and mapping out the potential incentives and disincentives (to reward and punish hotel partner's behavior).
To shape the framework, I explored a variety of game mechanics, leveling and scoring system, while also simulating its integration with the major task and scoring.
See the explorations below
Principles
Based on the explorations, we concluded that:
• Side tasks and its scoring should be separated from the Major task and scoring,
• but both scoring (Side and Major) will ultimately contribute to the overall Domino score.
Task Definition
Based on business impact, we define:
• Major task as ones that contribute higher impact to business metrics,
• Side tasks as ones which impact might not be reflected immediately but still increase supply quality
And based on the type of activities and degree of control:
• Major task requires continuous effort and are harder to achieve,
• Side task can be instantly completed or require process but less effort
Governance
We also defined a set of rules and policies to:
• maintain the balance between major and side task allocation (ensure feasibility)
• preventive measures against fraud and reduce drop off (after any task completion)
Side tasks are also divided into different categories based on its level of complexity
Implementation
Side task will be shown on multiple touch points (dashboard and email), where hotel partner can access:
• the breakdown of the score
• the entry point to Side Task list (to initiate the side task)
Task completion and its scores will be reflected on both the dashboard and weekly evaluation report as well.
Outcome
My contract ended right after the brief handover to the visual designer, hence there wasn't any opportunity to measure the business impact.
However, this design encouraged continuous engagement and higher quality of supply / services from hotel partners, which ultimately can lead to improvement to customer's experience and higher conversion such as:
• Increase of price competitiveness
• More robust inventory (variety of rate plans, refundable options, etc) and better content quality
• Better post-booking services and quality provided by hotel to guest
Key Learnings
Given the nature of the project, a deep knowledge of hospitality industry, Traveloka's business metrics and incentives programs are needed. I experienced a few misalignments due to my knowledge gaps, however we managed to resolve it by increasing the cadence of iterations and discussion.
If I could get the opportunity to restart this project, I would validate my concepts more quickly by consulting with domain experts to enable faster and better design iteration.
