User interviews

NOCLEGI PL

Noclegi is an accommodation booking platform. Their goal is to connect guests looking for accommodation with property owners. Noclegi offers a wide range of places to stay – from small apartments and wooden lodges to luxurious hotels. Since 2011, they have been a market-leading accommodation site in Hungary. After the apparent success on the domestic market, the company expanded its business to several other countries, including Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland.

Poland turned out to be our client’s most challenging market with the lowest conversion rates. The client was unable to identify the cause behind it. The company did not have enough information about habits of Polish travelers connected with trip planning and accommodation booking. They also did not know how Polish travelers perceived their product as compared to competitive booking sites. Additionally, they could not identify what points of friction might frustrate Polish users on their platform and lead to abandoned bookings.

By gathering more insights and discovering weak areas in their platform, the client would be then able to identify opportunities for improvement. 

We suggested conducting user interviews – one-on-one sessions that would result in in-depth knowledge about the client’s platform from the users’ perspective. We chose to conduct 20 user interviews: 10 face-to-face in one location and 10 remote interviews via Skype to cover different demographics, collect feedback across the country and ultimately gain better understanding of the problem. 

The interview consisted of two parts. The introductory part was a Q&A session in which users talked about their travelling habits and shared with us how they search for accommodation and what factors are important for them. 

The main part was a non-guided user testing where users simulated the real use of the Noclegi site. As users were trying to find accommodation and complete the booking, we had a chance to observe their reactions and behaviours. We gained understanding of what users think and feel when they interact with the platform. User interviews revealed areas that create confusion or do not meet user expectations. 

Users interviews were invaluable in identifying all the recurring issues with the site. We tagged the key themes and patterns and distilled the list of pain points and churn factors that needed to be addressed. We shared these insights with the client and his team on a one-day synthesis workshop. We discussed the research findings and helped the client understand the cause behind lower than expected conversion rates.

To equip the client with an actionable improvement plan for the platform, we assessed the impact and complexity of the issues to identified the low-hanging fruits and priorities. We also suggested specific solutions that could be implemented.