Improving Checkout Conversion on Mobile Web by 7%

Peerspace is the #1 marketplace for renting event, meeting, and studio space — with $500+ million in bookings. Think Airbnb, but for booking a meeting room for a couple hours, a rooftop for your sister's baby shower, or studio space for a photoshoot.

After a reorg at Peerspace, I found myself on the newly formed Monetization team. Revenue and reaching profitability was leadership's primary focus, so our roadmap was primarily top-down and strategy-driven — with a lot of eyeballs on our progress.

At the time, the team had a broad, shared understanding that there was a lot broken in the current checkout flow, especially on mobile web, which had been neglected for quite some time. Because there seemed to be so much to fix, it was overwhelming to get started. The team was in a state of paralysis, and these issues continued to go unfixed.

So as we started on bigger roadmap projects like adding a Split Payment option, I organized a series of workshops to generate some bottom-up initiatives starting at the user level — with a goal of finding obvious, easy wins we could add to the roadmap. This would allow us to report incremental progress towards profitability while we worked on our big features.

Peerspace didn't have any UX research or usability testing infrastructure we could use to understand how the current experience was affecting users' ability to checkout. So while I worked on spinning up those capabilities, I decided to leverage internal testing as a way to gather insights and align the team around our new product surface area. Two birds, one stone.

I chose to do a User Journey workshop as a way to align the team around what the current experience was for an average user, as well as a diverging step to start generating and documenting all the ways we could improve it. I invited all the engineers, product managers, and data analysts on our team — about 8 people in total.

To prep, I created a User Journey Map canvas in Figma that the team could work through together. On the x-axis, I provided a screenshot of each step of the current mobile web checkout flow.

On the y-axis, I had the following rows: User Actions, Needs, Pains/Frictions, Analytics or Data Questions, Opportunities, and Other Questions.

I also outlined clear outcomes I hoped the team would accomplish by the end of our hour-long workshop, sharing these at the start to keep us aligned and accountable.

With 8 people and only an hour, I divided attendees into pairs and assigned each pair a row/category to take notes on as they went through the checkout flow on their own device. Each pair had 20 minutes to go through the experience and fill out their assigned row. We then used the rest of the time to share, add, piggyback, and refine our post-its as a team.

Below is the completed User Journey Canvas at the conclusion of the workshop.

In the last 10 minutes, we shifted to the age-old question — what next? Specifically: how do we get these UX improvements into the roadmap? How do we justify that they should be prioritized?

We discussed determining ways to measure the impact of UX improvements — if we could get some baseline readings, we could make the case these baselines needed improving. But in practice, this would be a bit like creating red tape for ourselves. We decided as a team to start by putting the no-brainer, "low hanging fruit" ideas in the Jira backlog for the engineering team to pick up when they had time.

Agreeing to host rules is required to complete checkout — however, the current UI resulted in this section being missed by many users. Compounding the issue, when the user clicked "Request to Book," they were given an error but not scrolled to the place where the error occurred, so they didn't know what they needed to fix to move forward with their booking.

Sometimes the biggest growth wins come from small, iterative improvements. Our final design accomplished two things:

To increase visual prominence, we put the checkbox in a bounded grey box with a light grey background, making it stand out from the other, non-interactive parts of checkout. To guide the user to the error if they still missed this UI, we gave the grey box a red border and scrolled the user to the first error after clicking the Review & Pay button.

Since this was a relatively simple, front-end-only change, we added it to the Jira backlog with a low priority. The ticket was picked up fairly quickly — and just a week after the release, we saw a 7% increase in conversion on the payment page on mobile web, from an average of 54% conversion over the previous year to a year-high of 61%. It was the first time checkout on mobile web was over 60% in over a year.

Our PM, Stu, called out the win over Slack.

We can see this lift more prominently when we zoom in on the conversion data.

Conversion metrics are hard to move — and we saw a measurable improvement in a very short timeframe with a very low-effort, simple change. More importantly, this project unblocked and empowered the team to fix major UX and UI issues alongside higher-priority, higher-effort projects.

With this quick win under our belt, we continued to identify and backlog small UX wins. Next up was improving the communication of cancellation policies — specifically, surfacing the reassuring "free cancel within 24 hours" policy near the confirm button.

I also wanted to take advantage of the opportunity this newly-formed team presented to push us to be more data-driven and connect our work back to KPIs. Rather than get bogged down defining and aligning on metrics right away, it made sense to save that formal definition for later — and focus on getting a small win under our belt first.

I made a note of this on our workshop Figma board and continued the conversation past this project.