Payment for customers: user research at Booking.com

I worked in a team that was developing a new product allowing Booking.com users to pay on the website while making their reservation rather than with the accommodation. During the first stages of the product’s development, we needed to make sure that it would be beneficial to website users despite the constraints that we still had.

To do this we not only A/B tested the details on the website, but we also regularly did user research. In this example, our goal was to find ways to solve a known issue; many of our users don’t have a credit card, but many properties require credit card details or payment for the reservation.

I travelled to Hamburg with other members of the team, and we presented prototype versions of the website to see if users without a credit card would understand how to pay online for a reservation with a flexible cancellation policy, and whether they would find this useful.

We watched users interact with various parts of the process:

We were able to use the insights we gained to develop new ideas and run them as experiments on the website.