Project overview

Sonder is a new hospitality startup. In 2019, conversion on our direct booking channel, Sonder.com only 1.3% – well below the industry standard. We needed a redesign to double it in 4-6 months.

Role & team

Lead Designer with 5 SWEs and a half-time Product Manager (in person).

Timeline

2 weeks for UXR, audit, goal definition and strategy. 2 months of design and iteration. 

Skills

User research, workshop facilitation, concept developement, end-to-end Product Design

Process overview

Growth-minded redesign

We focused on the goals of each step of the flow (homepage, search, booking and checkout) to optimize overall completion. We had an audacious 2x goal handed to us by Sonder leadership. So we started with user research to uncover friction points and then conducted team brainstorms to generate solutions. 

Design Audit

What landed

Homepage – Desktop

Homepage – mobile

Search – mobile

Listing detail – mobile

Checkout – mobile

Sonder.com overiew – mobile

Results & lessons learned 

The redesign and thoughfulness put into the user flow paid off. The new site did slightly better than we hoped and also helped us acheive our Series D funding a few months after launch.  

Lessons learned:
1. Keep stakeholder close to the work, get their input early and share progress asynchronously and often.

2. Obvious always wins with users. There is little room for subtlety.

3. Beautiful imagery seduces, product details and features help seal the deal. 

150%

Time on site

2.2x

Conversion rate increase

$225M

Series D funding