Surfacing hidden tools for property owners
Client details have been anonymised to protect confidentiality.
- Client
- Holiday letting platform
- Role
- UX designer
- Timeline
- 6 months
- Type
- Live app
The challenge
The client is one of the UK’s largest holiday letting companies, and its app is the main way owners manage their properties. Feedback from users showed the calendar was by far the most used part of the app, while many owners didn’t know other features existed.
The app had everything property owners needed. It just wasn’t where they were looking.
Rather than adding more, the work focused on bringing what mattered into the places they already looked. I joined partway through, taking over from another designer and picking up new features as the app evolved.
Where owners went
CalendarOpened every dayEasy to miss
The process
Building on the calendar
I helped design the updated calendar, which brought current and upcoming bookings, owners’ own stays, income and occupancy together in one view, with important notices shown in context. Owners could see how a month was going at a glance, without jumping between screens.
- Bookings
- Own stays
- Income and occupancy
- Notices
One calendarEverything happening this month, at a glance
Keeping it simple
The calendar worked because it was simple, so nothing we added could be allowed to make it harder to use. The most useful information sat on the calendar, with the deeper detail a tap away, and the familiar interactions stayed the same so owners didn’t have to relearn a screen they used every day.
Switching between properties
Many owners let more than one cottage, and each one had its own calendar, earnings and bookings. I helped design a property switcher that sat at the top of the app, pairing each property’s photo with its name so owners always knew which one they were looking at. One tap opened their full list of properties, and the calendar, income and performance views all updated to match, which made moving between properties quick and easy.
Bringing hidden features to the surface
Useful tools like pricing and an optimisation tool were buried, so many owners never found them. Working with the product owner, I helped design a row of shortcuts on the home screen, sitting just below upcoming bookings, so the features owners were missing were one tap away from the screen they opened most.
Before
Home A screen deeper in the app Another screen deeper in Pricing and optimisation toolsBuried in the app
After
HomeUpcoming bookingsManage propertyPricingOptimise toolOne tap from home
The outcome
Results for the app as a whole, which I contributed to:
- More than 11,000 owners using the app at launch
- 320+ owners opting in straight away to a pricing optimisation tool, one of the features the new home screen shortcuts brought forward
- An average revenue uplift of more than 15% for owners using that tool
Looking back
When there was time between priorities, I explored a refresh of the full interface to bring it closer to the client’s brand and make the app feel lighter. I shared it with the client as a conversation starter rather than a finished proposal. In the end, a full redesign was too big a cost to justify without a clear return on investment, so it didn’t go ahead.
Owners not finding features was largely a symptom of the app’s information architecture. New tools had been added over time without the overall structure being revisited, so the app had grown around its features rather than around how owners actually used it. The ideal fix would have been to step back and redesign the structure with every feature, old and new, in mind.
A full redesign wasn’t realistic, so the work focused on getting the most out of the app as it was: building on the screen owners already used every day, and bringing the most valuable tools to where they’d see them. If I picked it up again, I’d push for an information architecture review early on, even a light one, so that smaller changes like these could build towards an improved structure over time.