Summary
I led the design and implementation of a seamless booking system on Yandex Maps, resulting verified daily bookings and providing a foundation for potential expansion into various service sectors.
Results
25,000+
Daily Bookings
15+
Partnered CRM’s
+++
Verified User Reviews
What I did
Competitive Audit
User Interface Design
User Experience Design
Art Direction
Team
Product Manager
Product Analyst
Lead Graphic Designer
Product Designer (me)
Platforms
Mobile
Web
Yandex Maps is the most popular mapping service in Russia, with 12+ million monthly users within the country and over 20 million worldwide.
Yandex Maps is a web mapping service that enables users to view maps of their location, search for places, and access information about those places, including photos, links, and guest reviews.
Background
In the beauty industry, most places organize their services using CRM, effectively managing business processes and guest appointments. Initially, the way Yandex Maps handled this feature was uneven; some used paid options like buttons with url’s to online booking to highlight, while others just shared a link to their website.
From a product perspective, adding a booking feature could:
Act as a main function alongside calling or planning a route. It also has the potential for future profitability by earning a commission from each booking.
Currently, bookings are part of the user experience but function separately from Maps' user flow and the broader Yandex ecosystem.
Goals
The goal is to design the user journey for booking and visiting a beauty salon using Yandex Maps.
All online booking services are part of a CRM system, where businesses work. Creating a new CRM system takes too long. It's cheaper and more practical to design a booking form with free API access.
CRM systems have limitations that affect possible solutions, such as data format and load level. In simple terms, showing the nearest available time and date when searching for places isn't possible due to too many requests per second.
Another constraint is understanding how well the process works. Since partners didn't provide data on their flow's efficiency, we had to do it ourselves. That's why we designed a similar solution from the start to measure its effectiveness.
Market Research
I conducted a comprehensive analysis of major players in the beauty salon CRM market using Yandex Maps data, highlighting their features, visual style, interface, and user journey. Based on these findings, I drew conclusions with clear hypotheses for making informed decisions and conducting experiments.
Design
I developed a linear solution based on research findings and technical constraints. All contentious ideas were set aside to be tested through experiments later.
After launching the MVP version, I collaborated with the manager and analyst to work on hypotheses that could enhance the sign-up conversion. Some improvements resulted from launch constraints, while others emerged after regular interviews with users about their experiences using Yandex Maps for sign-ups and other products. I will discuss several improvements made in the context of working on conversion.
Selected Improvements
Here are a few examples of approaches to improving the scenario during the project's duration.
1. Booking Without Registration
Registration is a pain point for users who just want to complete their task. Since bypassing identity confirmation is not possible due to CRM systems, I designed a solution to confirm bookings via phone number. It was assumed that the share of unauthenticated users could be significant, but over time, this was not confirmed — 80% of users make bookings while authenticated. The share of authenticated users is important, as they gain more capabilities within the product, such as rebooking and automatic data filling in forms.
2. Starting Point Selection
The next improvement involved validating the non-linearity of the process. In the MVP version, the booking form followed a linear structure to offer maximum flexibility of services, time and staff.
Some CRM systems provided variability in choosing the starting point, whether it was a service, a staff, or a specific time slot. During interviews, respondents frequently mentioned the scenario of scheduling with a specific staff, leading users to adjust their schedules accordingly.
A/B experiment revealed that changing the user path from linear to non-linear the average booking time decreased by 5%, while the number of repeat bookings increased by 10%. An additional area on the home screen facilitated its enhancement by incorporating previous appointments or promotional campaigns.
Home booking screen with previous bookings
Home booking screen with Yandex Plus campaign
3. Planning Horizon
During interviews, users mentioned that their planning horizon is typically one to two weeks. In such cases, closer dates to the current date are more significant than looking ahead a month. By shifting the focus from a month to the nearest days, the booking time has decreased by 15%.
4. Reminders
During interviews, users mentioned that not all places remind them through messengers, making it easy to forget when to go. Since SMS, the most effective solution, was quite expensive, the focus shifted to a solution that users had already found — the calendar. After making a booking, users can immediately add the appointment to their calendar. Many users expressed their desire to use this feature even before it was implemented.
5. Signals into Reviews
After launching and obtaining data on solution performance, the overall experience of visiting a place remained a mystery. While finding a place and booking are important, the experience of the visit itself is crucial and can be influenced by various factors, including false information, poor CRM integration and offline service quality.
To gather feedback on these issues, I added a small feedback form accessible through bookings. Based on user feedback, the team may decide how to address these signals or places with the most complaints.
In practice, users only left positive feedback. Since the received signals were only available to the team, it made sense to use this channel for obtaining ratings and reviews from users. Thanks to the form in bookings, the number of verified reviews in beauty salons increased.
6. Cashback system
In addition to improving processes, the goal was to attract a new audience. The cashback system in transactional services successfully achieved this by encouraging users to try new services at a discounted rate while keeping them within the ecosystem.
Yandex Plus bonus points serve as a form of cashback and are awarded across various Yandex services for rides, purchases, orders, and entertainment. When users complete an order within a Yandex Plus service, they receive points that can be accumulated across different Yandex services.
The Maps team collaborated with the Yandex Plus team to experiment with subsidizing first appointments. Cashback was only given to users who completed the entire process, from booking a service to attending it. Users who did not attend the appointment did not receive any cashback.
To sum up, the cashback encourages users to try out new services. The number of users who used the booking feature through Maps for the first time during the campaign increased by 30%. However, there was no significant change in the number of Yandex Plus subscriptions.
Results
Every business has the opportunity to showcase services and specialists through photos. However, it's common that only some businesses upload every photo, disrupting the visual flow. To address this, the graphic designer and I created themed placeholders that appear when only a some photos occurs in the service group or on the specialists screen. Specialist, same as any service in the list randomly receive one of these placeholders. Over time, businesses noticed these changes and began adding their actual photos to represent specialists better.
After
Outcome
After launching the MVP and making improvements to the booking form, along with expanding the project to mobile platforms, we saw an increase in daily bookings. Within a year, the number of daily bookings reached 10,000. More CRM systems, serving beauty salons and other areas like spas and tattoo studios, joined in as the platform gained popularity.
The active development phase concluded, and the project moved into a support phase. New CRM systems were added, and engineers fixed any bugs that came up. Even though we transitioned to support, the number of daily bookings more than doubled over the year.
The project proved to be successful, offering a new advertising advantage. Moreover, the booking system has the potential to expand into other areas, such as ticket purchases, restaurant reservations, doctor appointments, or gym bookings.
25,000+
Daily Bookings
15+
Partnered CRM’s
+++
Verified User Reviews
