Summary
TrovaTrip offers a marketplace of vetted, local expert itineraries to Creators or Influencers who want to take their online communities offline and together in real life.
The platform brings together locally-based Trip Operators with online communities seeking safe, easy, and accessible group travel.
TrovaTrip has helped about 700 Creators book more than 30,000 Travelers on more than 1,500 trips.
When I joined Trova in 2022 the business was finding success in group travel led by influencers. Revenue was up and the company had run over 50 trips that year.
Product led growth to achieve scale
I was hired to transform our manual heavy processes into streamlined, automated solutions that worked for all three sides of our travel marketplace.
The existing web application was riddled with design debt. I presented the following issues to leadership to communicate the need for a design system:
• Dozens of outdated button, link, and card variations
• Unresponsive page layouts
• No pattern library
• Confusing and overworked color pallet
• Poor layout and site architecture
System Achievements
Components
Developers
Loading
Modality
Entering data
Task Flows
Brand
Design Foundations
Components
Patterns
Password:
ownourcompass
As a product team we identified three key moments of host drop-offs:
• 30% drop off during email activation
• 21% drop off during onboarding
• 98%% drop off during qualification
Onboarding
Using the new stepper and selectable card components the onboarding flow focused on simple interactions with clear value to the user.
Email Activation
The new email confirmation page that focused on a clear call to action. Drop off went from 30% to 12% after the design was implemented.
Within weeks of releasing connected social accounts and lead scores, we released a new vision for trip requests on the platform. The existing experience allowed hosts to select any day they wished to start a trip. We would then reach out to trip operators to confirm that these days were available.
This led to longer wait times and more risk for the business if trips failed to confirm enough travelers.
Happy Operators, Happy Hosts, Less Financial Risk
I designed this interface to allow operators to upload the new set date itineraries into our system. We interviewed around 10 operators to collect feedback and test the proposed designs.
They loved the simplicity of the new UI's and were able to upload hundreds of new itineraries within the first week.
Host Selection for Set Date Itineraries
As a three sided marketplace any new feature usually requires interfaces to support the other user groups on the platform. For set date itineraries this new day selection emphasizes the difference in price between dates. Since itinerary availability was reduced to a few dates a month these card selections created less confusion and a better itinerary selection experience.
Host Profiles were created for hosts to manage their email collection links, surveys and reviews all in one location.
Hosts promoted themselves on the platform using profile pages, resulting in a massive growth of inbound traffic to TrovaTrip domains.
Using the new design system we wanted to take control over trip bookings and provide travelers with additional services that could be purchased as add-ons during booking.
• Bookings supported multiple travelers
• Accommodations became configurable upon booking
• Trip Add-Ons like optional activities could be booked for each traveler
• Selectable cards allowed for stripe and affirm auto payments
Conversion rates for the redesigned booking application went from 25% to 84%.
The opportunity to lead design at TrovaTrip has been an unbelievable journey of tackling challenging problems at scale and with speed.
The early investment in our design system proved to be worth the investment as our product and engineering teams were able to start developing new designs at a faster and faster pace.
One key takeaway was how important being connected to users and business needs is a product designer. When speed to release was prioritized over research and talking to customers we often had to revisit requirements after the feature was released.