Love Home Swap
On a mission to transform the way the world travels.
Company
Love Home Swap
Role
Head of Product Design
Team
1 x Head of Product
2 x Product Managers
1 x UX Researcher
3 x Engineers
The Story
Love Home Swap connects home-loving travellers to properties across 100+ countries worldwide. I led the major rebrand and iteration of the acquisition funnel, this is the story behind my process.
At the time, the company undertook a major rebrand initiative as part of their growth strategy. Within 3 months, I played a crucial role in working with Why Projects and stakeholders to strategise for brand positioning, vision and rollout. I worked with multiple teams to implement a global rebrand and developed a Design System to improve collaboration. I also worked on Homepage and How It Works 2.0, both high impact areas within the acquisition funnel.
Product thinking
Home swapping is not an easy decision, and the core problem was that users didn’t engage well with our Homepage and How It Works.
We needed to build trust and improve how users move through the funnel. Over a sprint, I worked with Product to synthesise data, generate insights and facilitated workshops to probe our problem statement. To help us test comprehension and trust in the business model, we broke down variables into tests, and formulated hypotheses for iteration.
Data & validation
I also conducted behavioural analysis for both pages, which revealed a significant drop off in interaction below the fold.
To validate, I created a series of UX prototypes and tested concepts with users to refine and iterate. After a few rounds, we saw improved feedback and users spent significantly more time on areas around our proposition, swap model and signup paywalls. The validation helped us surface meaningful opportunities to provide more value to our users.
Driving
the right tech
initiatives forward.
- Love Home Swap has a diverse audience and a complex proposition. As part of my design approach, the focus was to create clarity and support our engagement strategy through a fresh and playful language. I also took the opportunity to integrate member trip and Trustpilot reviews to increase the validation and trust aspect on the platform.
- With the rebrand in motion, I spent 2 months working with Why Projects to establish strategy and presented challenge cases on how we could maximise growth value as part of the initiative. After successful implementation, I partnered with Marketing, Operations and Technology teams to extend all visual, strategy and tonal communications across the organisation.
- I also self-initiated a project to build an Atomic Design System for Technology teams. The initiative started as my evaluation of our workflow, which I identified the need for long-term improvement to our product standards and to support scalability. I spent 6 months working with Engineers to deliver a full component library housing all styles and code. Commercially, the System provided significant positive value for cross-squad collaboration, time and cost efficiency for the company.
The Outcome
We launched the new Homepage and How It Works 2.0, alongside the official rebrand in 2020.
We ran A/B tests on both designs over a 1 month period against the original baseline. The Homepage test revealed a +37% improvement in overall trial conversion, compared to the original base. We saw a -16% decrease in bounce rate and +28% increase in engagement on this page. This helped validated our aim for building trust through transparency.
Key insights from the How It Works test revealed a +28.45% increase in scroll percentage, and -8% decrease in bounce rate. This indicated users saw more of the content, with +21% increase of visitors reaching the bottom of our new design, compared to the original baseline. During the A/B test, the number of trialists who listed their home increased by +13% within the acquisition funnel, suggesting a positive impact in this variation.
Our learnings from the winning variation highlighted the importance of explaining our offering clearly and being transparent about our product. The reality of home swapping is a big decision, and we found that once users got through the barriers of unknowns, they were curious to find out more. This could help steer the product to improved conversion rates in future iterations.
In my time with Love Home Swap, my contribution helped us win two awards;
World’s Best Home Exchange Platform (1st annual World Travel Tech Awards)
Best Home Exchange Site Award (The Shortyz 2021)
