Increasing adoption to Automatic Pricing
Product design > Turo case studies > Improving Automatic Pricing adoption
Synopsis
Turo is the largest peer to peer car sharing company in the US based out of San Francisco. It serves as a marketplace for people who own cars (hosts) to share their cars with people who need a car (guests). In 2018 I joined a specialized team tasked with improving our pricing to increase net revenue.
Details
Team: Pricing team
Platforms: IOS/ Android/Web
Role: Senior Product Designer (Design lead on a cross functional team)
Timeline: 2-3 months
Skils: UX/UI, User research
Company Problem
By early 2018 Turo’s intelligent pricing algorithm, called Automatic Pricing, had shown a steady decline in adoption rate from hosts. New hosts were automatically defaulted into Automatic pricing, and yet a significant number of active vehicles in search had opted to turn it off.
Because Turo believed that the algorithm sets better prices that lead to more bookings, it became crucial that we increase the amount of hosts who opt to use it.
How might we help hosts better manage their pricing while still increasing revenue for Turo?
Goals and metrics
Understand why so many hosts opt out of automatic pricing
Improve the value prop of automatic pricing and convince hosts to stay on it.
Optimize the Automatic Pricing model to improve revenue.
Improve the user experience of managing pricing settings
Gross revenue
Increase gross revenue via host adoption of automatic pricing.
Automatic pricing adoption
Number of active vehicles in search with Automatic pricing
Research phase
We spent a month in the divergence phase, digging into metric data, conducting user interviews, auditing the current user experience and comparing to competitive analysis. With all of these insights, we put together a plan.
User interviews
With the help of our researcher, Michelle Kosterich, we conducted moderated remote phone interviews with hosts to ask them how they felt about pricing.
Recruitment criteria:
7 existing Turo hosts
Ranging from owning 1-20 cars on the platform
US only
Insights
Different hosts have different strategies for pricing
Some hosts want to maximize utilization of their cars. We found this happens most often with a host who is using Turo’s platform as a business.
Other hosts want to maximize earnings for each trip. These types of hosts want to make the most they can for each day their car is being driven. They are hyper sensitive to the value of their time, which may stem from their location and relative distance from airports or common delivery spots. Other hosts are hyper sensitive to the cost of maintaining their car.
Hosts want more control with Automatic Pricing
When we asked hosts why they opted out of Automatic Pricing, the number one complaint was not having control over determining their weekly and monthly discounts. Hosts also didn’t understand how the discounts could make the price drop below the minimum daily price they set.
Some hosts want more control, but manual pricing is time consuming
The hosts that turn off Automatic pricing could set one flat price but struggled with knowing what to price to set. They often spent hours researching and checking similar listings in their markets prices and cross referencing their availability. They also have to spend time manually overriding their prices for certain days or on weekends with a pricing calendar that has a sub par user experience. All of this hinders their workflow and makes managing their vehicles a difficult task.
Competitive analysis
We analyzed other market places like Airbnb, Etsy, Getaround, and thumbtack for ideas on how we could improve our messaging around pricing. Airbnb has a really great example of how to provide the right amount of context. They also force a host to determine pricing settings in the listing flow, which creates additional friction but sets a host up for success.
Design audit
I reviewed the original flow and quickly realized there were some big problems about educating a host on the value of Automatic pricing.
Too much hidden information
With the current design, we were hiding a lot of important context for each setting inside the question mark tooltips and we were relying on a user to discover that information on their own.
Difficult to digest
Additionally, one of the most important questions “How much will I earn” was not easy to digest or understand.
Complex error states
Some of the form fields had validation logic that was contingent on other fields. For example, if a host set a minimum daily price and then added a discount that would push the daily price below the minimum, a poorly worded error would occur, often leaving hosts to scratch their heads.
Developing our plan
After a month of diving deep into the current issues with pricing, we discovered several areas we could focus on. We developed a plan that would pave the way for the next generation of our pricing.
Fix the Automatic pricing algorithm
We knew that no matter what we did to improve the UI and UX of the pricing feature, hosts would not use it if we didn’t improve the logic behind pricing itself. The Data scientists set out to simplify the variables and incorporate more intelligence.
Give hosts with Automatic Pricing more control
We heard hosts loud and clear when they said they wanted control over their discounts. The second most common piece of feedback about the failings of automatic pricing was that hosts wanted the ability to override any day’s price on the pricing calendar. This is what shaped our new view on Automatic pricing vs manual pricing. We decided it would no longer be a binary choice, but that we would dedicate the next six months on blending the two together.
Give hosts who choose manual pricing more guidance
While we felt that adding back more control to Automatic Pricing would solve many of the complaints hosts had with the feature, we also knew that fluctuating prices aren’t for everyone. Some hosts still want to set one price and leave it. For those people, we wanted to provide more guidance on what Turo thinks is the right price. They can choose to ignore it, but will have peace of mind.
Improve the information architecture
The toggle for turning on Automatic pricing on and off determines all the other settings on the page. I moved this to the top of the page to match the information architecture and logic.
Wireframes
A majority of the designing process came down to organizing the form fields into a more logical order and introducing a less severe “nudge” state to the fields that would provide more guidance.
IOS/Android
Some of the issues with the existing experience involved the position of Automatic pricing toggle. Turning it on and off would change the rest of the fields on the page, and yet it was positioned at the bottom of the page. We moved to correct this, and added the ability to set custom discounts in automatic pricing.
Desktop web
Desktop suffered from a similar organizational issue as IOS and Android did. Automatic pricing was moved to the top of the page, and more white space was added between sections to create separation. We also re-worked the layout of the form fields themselves to improve scanability.
Final design
In addition to re-organizing the content and adding more contextual and explanatory copy, we updated the UI and utilized some newer design patterns such as the white modals. This helped us give full focus to one setting and provide just enough context for that specific setting inline.
The pricing page is re-organized to allow for a logical cascading effect happen when automatic pricing is toggled on or off.
Final Outcome
We were thrilled to see that by giving hosts more control over their prices, simplifying the algorithm, and changing the way we talk about pricing, we were able to increase adoption by 10% in a matter of a few months.
This change also resulted in an 11% increase in host activation rate (listing, getting a booking, and accepting their first trip).
Finally, this initiative increased gross revenue by 6%.
Chart made End of 2018
As of the end of 2019, the adoption rate has improved an additional 10% organically with no changes to Pricing UI.
Vision work
Our vision for Pricing was to create more visual representations of Turo’s recommended price. We had hoped in 2019 to surface more data to hosts so that they feel even more informed and empowered to manage their pricing and their business.
The team has shifted its strategies and I have since rolled off the pricing team, but these were some early ideas that I was excited to pursue at the time.
