Growing Adoption of Automatic pricing

Increasing adoption to automatic pricing

By early 2019 Drivezy’s intelligent pricing algorithm, called Automatic Pricing, had shown a steady decline in adoption rate form hosts. New hosts were automatically defaulted into automatic pricing, and yet a significant number of active vehicles in search opted to turn it off.

Because Drivezy believed that the algorithm sets better prices that lead to more bookings, it became crucial that we increase the amount of hosts who opt to use it.

My Role

I was the lead product Designer on this project, responsible on cross functional team .

In addition, I worked with a researcher to plan and conduct exploratory research, with a UX writer on messaging and IA and also lead a conducted usability tests.

How might we help hosts better manage their pricing while still increasing revenue for drivezy?

Research Phase

We spent a month in the divergence phase, digging into metric data, conducting user interview, auditing the current user experience and comparing to competitive analysis. with all if these insight, we put together a plan.

User Interview

With the help Product team, we conducted moderated Google meet interviews with hosts to ask them how they felt about pricing.

Recruitment Criteria:

1. 10 existing Drivezy hosts

2. Ranging from owning 1-10 cars on the platform

3. US only

Competitive Analysis

We analysed other market place like Airbnb, Etsy ,Getaround, Turo for ideas on how we could improve our messaging around pricing. Airbnb has a really great example of how to provide the right amount of context. they also force a host to determine pricing settings in the listing flow, which creates additional friction but sets a host up for success.

Design Audit

I reviewed the original flow and quickly realised there were some big problem about educating a host on the value of Automatic pricing.

To much hidden information

With the current design, we were hiding a lot of important context for each setting inside the question mark tooltips and we were relying on a user to discover that information on their own.

Difficult to digest

Additionally, one of the most important question “How much will I earn” was not easy to digest or understand.

Complex error states

Some of the form fields had validation logic that was contingent on other fields for example, If a host set a minimum daily price and then added a discount thatwould push the daily price below the minimum, a poorly worded error would occur, often leaving hosts to scratch their heads

Wireframes

A majority of the designing process came down to organising the form fields into a more logical order and introducing less severe “nudge” state to the fields that would provide more guidance.

IOS/Android

Some of the issues with the existing experience involved the position of automatic pricing toggle. Turning it on and off would change the rest of the fields on the page, and yet it was positioned at the bottom of the page. We moved to correct this, and added the ability to set custom discounts in automatic pricing.

Final Design

In addition to re-organising the content and adding more contextual and explanatory copy, we updated the UI and utilised some newer design patterns such as the white model. This helped us give full focus to one setting and provide just enough context for that specific setting inline.

Final Outcome

We were thrilled to see that by giving hosts more control over their prices, simplifying the algorithm, and changing the way we talk about pricing, we were able to increase adoption by 10% in a matter of a few months.

This change also resulted in a 11% increase in host activation rate (listing, getting a booking, and accepting their first trip).

Finally, this initiative increased gross revenue by 6%.

Vision work

Our vision for pricing was to create more visual representations of Drivezy’s recommended price. We had hoped in 2019 to surface more date to hosts so that they feel even more informed and empowered to manage their pricing and their business.

The team has shifted its strategies and I have since rolled off the pricing team, but these were some early ideas that I was excited to pursue  at the time.

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