Industry
P2P Car Sharing Marketplace
Role
Product Design • iOS • Android • Web
Turo
Modernizing favoriting to fuel engagement and conversions
Turo’s original favoriting system offered limited functionality and led to guest frustration. I led the redesign of a modern, user-friendly experience that significantly boosted guest engagement, bookings, and enabled our marketing team with new tools to drive personalized outreach.
Full case study available on request
Launched experience
Problem
A decline in guest favoriting cars raised concerns around how it might impact guest converting and booking
Favoriting cars proved to be a driving factor in booking with 20% of bookings coming from previously favorited cars
Even in its original bare-bones form, we observed that favoriting was a critical step in guest booking behavior. However, Turo’s old implementation frustrated guests by forcing them to use a single list for planning all trips, which contributed to a decline in repeat usage. With roughly 20% of guests converting and booking from previously favorited vehicles, enhancing this feature was seen as a excellent opportunity to shore up our conversion funnel.
All vehicles were dropped into one long list
Lacked utility for repeat guest usage
Legacy UI that didn't align to latest design system components
20% of guest booked from a previously favorited car and our hypothesis was that with an improved experience we could elevate that metric
Opportunity
How might we make Favorites a core part of the Guest booking experience to boost engagement and increase booking frequency?
Process
The project kicked off with an audit of current UX at Turo and how it compared to our competitors
16 competitors and companies utilizing a similar favoriting feature were audited to see how we might modernize our experience
Competitive analysis
Observation
Two methods of favoriting were observed from the audit
When thinking about favoriting on Turo we wanted to hit a balance around trip planning and highlighting our unique selection. Some guest favorite for fun and some for planning trips
Curation focused: When analyzing apps with a concept of favoriting and list creation we see a curation focused tool set serve content focused apps better. Think YouTube or Spotify.
Planning focused: Planning focused favoriting lend itself well to decision-making. Think Airbnb or Tripadvisor.
Selected slides: Features identified for the redesign scope
Process
Workshopping was done in addition to auditing with the goal of aligning business, marketing, and product needs
This proved valuable in ensuring we align our different teams and it was an opportunity to generate additional ideas that we would later user test
Affinity mapping for team alignment and idea generation
Wireframing
The two methods of favoriting were designed out so we could user tested what resonated with guest most
Curation focused: When analyzing apps with a concept of favoriting and list creation we see a curation focused tool set serve content focused apps better. Think YouTube or Spotify.
Planning focused: Planning focused favoriting lend itself well to decision-making. Think Airbnb or Tripadvisor.
Selected slides: Features identified for the redesign scope
Testing
Moderated user testing was conducted and signaled we were including features guest found valuable
Testing indicated guest primarily used favoriting for trip planning and that we should lean into planning related features over curation related features
Final design
I moved forward with designing out a planning focused set of features for our new favoriting experience
This new design leveraged many new design system components and modernized our code to scale better for future updates as well. User testing was conducted to ensure any gaps were addressed
I owned the end-to-end design of this feature across all app touch points. This spanned iOS, Android, desktop web, and mobile web designs.
Selected slides: Native app designs presented during stakeholder presentations
Impact
Creating a new essential step for guest booking a car on Turo
Favoriting went from 20% to 30% — this accounts for an average of $15,000,000 in average monthly bookings
Scalable modern UI
Utilizing new design system component allowed us to refactor more parts of our app code. This would allow for easier and faster updated compared to our legacy experience
Marketing tool
our marketing team now has a new tool to drive guest engagement with the use of sharable list and celebrity list. (See Doug DeMuro's favorite cars on Turo)