Intro

Parkhound and Spacer are online marketplaces that help people find parking spaces that others aren’t using and allow parking space owners to make some extra cash from their unused space. It connects people with additional parking spaces with those needing somewhere to park.

Its nature as a marketplace means there are two types of users to focus on: parking spot bookings and listings.

The Problem

Over time, the conversion rate for both bookings of spaces and the rate of successful listings completed of new spaces was steadily decreasing.

After consulting our customer support teams, collating and parsing reviews, and looking at the drop-offs in the user journey for both sides of the marketplace, we discovered the culprit behind the decreasing conversion rate: Poor-quality listings.

Customers looking for an adequate parking space reported a need for more information and imagery, but they were not gaining valuable information about the spaces that would lead to successful conversions. These included a need for more information about the security and the size of the parking spaces.
Considering the dual nature of the marketplace, the natural true culprit of these poor-quality listings was the hosts of these spaces. They weren’t adding the information about their spaces to convince users to book them.

The Challenge

Addressing these problems highlighted the importance of addressing the cognitive effort needed to create a listing. If hosts found the listing experience too taxing and time-consuming to complete, that would lead to both a drop in listing creation and a drop in listing quality.

If we addressed the poor-quality listing complaints of parkers exclusively, the host listing experience could require too much effort from hosts, and there would be an increased abandonment rate of new listing creations.

The Strategy

Due to the lean nature of the team, the low traffic the host listing process receives and the urgency of declining conversion rates, implementing an A/B testing strategy to make incremental, verified changes over time was not considered a viable option.

Instead, we opted for a complete flow redesign based on a heuristic evaluation, analytics data, comprehensive industry and competitor research and a thorough review of the feedback and common complaints the phone and chat support teams receive from parkers and hosts.

Studies done by the Baymard Institute, and CXL show complex multi-column forms are more cumbersome to complete:

Testing from CXL revealed multi-column forms take longer to fill out [Source]

The Baymard Institute observed that forms with multicolumn designs led users to either complete unrelated or unnecessary fields or skip or omit required fields that they had overlooked [Source]

We also took a mobile-first approach to the optimisations, as ensuring the new listing experience was as easy to use as possible on smartphones meant that hosts could more easily complete the listing and take photos while outside in the area itself.

Our customer service team highlighted in particular that hosts had the propensity to abandon their listing creation when asked to measure their car space, take photos of it and often expressed difficulty with trying to think of a title and a description for their space, which makes much sense, how interesting can a parking space be?

The Optimisations

These improvements resulted in a noted decrease in users reaching out to support for help making and booking listings and a decrease in the rate of listing creation abandonment.