Vrbo Owner Dashboard
I led the end to end redesign of Vrbo owner dashboard, transforming an overlooked homepage with 19% engagement into an essential daily tool, driving 25% increased visits YoY with 8% monthly growth
Team
Expedia Partner Solutions
Role
Lead designer
Year
2022-2023
Overview
Vrbo Owner is a central hub for property owners and managers using the Vrbo platform. In early 2022, vacation rentals became a top priority for Expedia Group.
As the primary landing page, the dashboard has high engagement potential and significant impact on key company metrics by directing traffic to various areas of the platform.
The frustrating journey begins...
Our partners faced a static, low value dashboard with just 19% click through rate (even lower on app), failing to provide actionable insights or support critical tasks.
Our partners are used to land and bounce to other domain pages.
Reimagining a new dashboard
The product vision
By creating adaptive, customizable experiences that get smarter with each interaction, we can drive optimized partner experiences, supplier earnings and company revenue.
The design goal
Build a dashboard that:
Know me: Provide a tailored experience based on my needs
Show me: Present the most relevant information or tools I need quickly
Guide me: Suggest the next best actions to grow my business over time
Support me: Discover helpful information and get support when I can’t find what I need
My role
⛳️ Owned end to end design process from discovery to handoff
🤝 Drove the collaboration across 6 feature teams
🎨 Facilitated a 7-day design sprint with cross-functional stakeholders for ideation
👨🏾💻 Collaborated closely with PM, SWE, TPM, UX researcher, and content designer
Before: an overlooked homepage
After: an essential daily tool
Impact
Overall, we continue seeing organic growth in new homepage visits.
📈 Growth
25% more sessions compared to previous year, and 8% monthly increase
By March 2023
💬 User feedback
78% positive vs 22% negative, that is 5% more in positive feedback compared to July.
By August 2023
🎉 Engagement
40% completion rate of in-context promotions
34% CTR into top tasks
By August 2023
📱Feedback from app user:
Product and design discovery
I drove (and co-led with product manager) a comprehensive discovery process. This approach ensured our solutions were grounded in genuine user needs while addressing business priorities across multiple product domains
Identified critical user pain points
Conducted user interviews - interviewed 2 Vrbo hosts & 2 internal teams and gathered 4 critical insights
Design idea generation - HMW working session
Worked with data analytics to identify partner segments
Drove cross-team discovery sessions, document each feature team’s JTBD
Synthesized past relevant research
Design ideation
With all the insights that came out of the research, it's time for creativity, I facilitated a 7-day design sprint with key stakeholders, and led this group turn all the insights into sketches, ideas, and concepts.
Scope core capabilities
Collaborated with product manager and engineer team to evaluate the fundamental capabilities and align on product vision.
User research
As design sprint outcome, we created two different concepts (Comprehensive vs. Focused) for user research to determine the more effective approach.
The goal:
• Gather signal if the concepts in general served user needs
• Validate that we are targeting the right JTBDs
• Testing strategy decision: compare two distinct design approaches (comprehensive vs. focused)
Iteration based on user research
What tested well:
Most of participants found the new concepts provide valuable overview of their property. The concepts addressed most of the users' needs and JTBDs.
What didn’t test well:
Some concepts (pick up where you left off & Pinned modules) were not useful or caused confusions. The feedback was mixed.
Detailed examples:
Evolution
As we have more clarities on the overall direction, based on key learnings from research. We now focus on visual explorations. I led the information architecture and UI iteration process, trying to push the boundaries of existing design system. The goal is to balance scalability and information visibility optimization.
Northstar visual exploration
I also tried to push design system in innovative ways, and it did help me to think out of the box.
MVP scope decision
Final solution (MVP)
Desktop
Mobile
Usability lab testing
Prior to MVP milestone 1 launch in Feb 2023, we conducted a in-person interview with 5 live users in our lab.
✅ User reaction was overwhelmingly positive - the MVP meet their needs well
⭕️ App performance - iOS users are experiencing latency and other tech issues.
“Very clear! and just right amount of information.”
“It has that slick, modern feel. Feels like... cool”
Timeline recap
*Instead of doing a one-time hand off, we handed off modular design incrementally to meet the target timeline.
Impact for internal team
👏👏👏
Cross-function excellence
We pioneered a collaborative model across 6 features teams with different priorities, establishing a framework now used for complex cross-team projects
📐📐📐
Scalable framework
This homepage framework was successfully adapted by Expedia hotel partner dashboard, enabling reusability.
📱📱📱
Mobile strategy advancement
Supported the company’s ‘Mobile first’ strategic initiative by drastically improving the Vrbo owner mobile experience
Looking forward...
Adaptive experience
Improve the homepage experience that evolves with user journey, adjust content, actions and tools based on their experience level and business maturity
User customization
Implement the highly desired customization capabilities validated in our research, enabling owners to tailor their homepage to match their unique workflow priorities