KEY Casestudy
This case study highlights the optimization of KEY.co, a leading luxury vacation home rental platform. The project focused on enhancing the booking experience by addressing user pain points, eliminating bottlenecks, resolving usability issues, and implementing actionable improvements to simplify the process, elevate user satisfaction, and boost conversion rates.
Date
2022-2024
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Company
KEY.co, a leading luxury vacation home rental site that curates exceptional homes and provides in-home services to make trips more simple and elevated.
Problem
KEY faced several challenges:
High Drop-Off Rates: Users visited the site but weren’t booking—whether for instant book homes or request-to-book properties.
Unclear Drop-Off Reasons: Where, when, and why were users abandoning the process? Identifying the friction points was a challenge.
Lack of Internal Alignment: The team lacked a shared understanding of the booking funnel, different user paths, and key problem areas, making it harder to diagnose and address the issue effectively.
The goal was to improve the homes booking conversion by identifying all user pain points, eliminating bottlenecks, releasing quick actionable items.
The Process
To tackle the booking drop-off challenge, I led a multi-month design sprint approach—with a twist. The goal wasn’t just to build shiny new features, but to deeply understand the root problems and turn the right solutions into small, actionable, high-impact steps. That meant prioritizing ruthlessly and leaving some "good ideas" on the cutting room floor.
Phase 1: Understand
This phase took longer than expected—and for good reason. One of the biggest blockers wasn’t a UX bug or a broken button, but a lack of shared understanding across the team. No one had a full picture of the booking flow, which paths users were actually taking, or where the true drop-offs were happening. This alignment laid the foundation for better brainstorming and faster decision-making later on.
Mapping out user flows: Divided into 3 main stages: Homes search, Booking, Post-booking
Identifying Problems
I facilitated cross-functional workshops with developers, stakeholders, and managers to align everyone on how the booking funnel actually worked. Mapping it out together surfaced a lot: bugs we hadn’t noticed, confusing user paths, bottlenecks, and incorrect internal assumptions. Together, we identified over 72+ problems in just the homes search and booking process alone.
Solution
Given tight development constraints, the approach prioritized small, high-impact, low-effort improvements that could drive measurable results. Given the limitations, not every great UX improvement could be implemented, making prioritization crucial in deciding which solutions to release first. Here's a sliver of some of the solutions:
1. Confusion between booking types
Unlike other vacation rental sites, KEY.co offered two types of homes: instant booking homes with real-time pricing and availability, and “request price” homes that showed average pricing and might not actually be available.
The problem? Guests often couldn’t tell the difference. Many ended up requesting quotes on homes that looked cheaper but turned out to be unavailable or way more expensive than expected due to seasonal pricing. It felt like a bait and switch—guests thought they found a great deal, only to be disappointed. This led to frustration and, in many cases, they gave up on booking altogether.
There was also a section called “Similar Homes for You” under the main results, but it wasn’t working well. It mixed together homes that only loosely matched filters or had different dates, without explaining why they were being shown. It just added to the confusion and didn’t convert.
To fix this, we added a clear “Instant Booking” badge to the home cards and moved all request-price listings into a separate section called “By Request Only.” This helped set better expectations and made it easier for guests to find homes they could actually book.
Ease over urgency
The site used to push guests to pick dates right away by auto-opening the date picker—assuming it would boost conversions. But it came off as aggressive and interrupted the browsing experience. Not everyone’s ready to commit. So, we removed the popup and cleaned up pushy language like “Book now, availability is subject to change” to create a more relaxed, on-brand experience.
No more sticker shock
Guests were getting turned off by long, confusing fee breakdowns—cleaning fees, vague PM charges, a KEY coordination fee—sometimes adding up to 30% of the nightly rate. It felt like a bait and switch. So we simplified it by rolling all fees (except taxes) into the nightly price. We also added a “due now, due later” feature so guests didn’t have to pay everything upfront—something they’d been asking for.
Small fixes, Big Impact
Sometimes, it’s not about big, flashy features—it’s about getting the basics right. One small moment of friction or confusion can be all it takes for a guest to bounce and look elsewhere. That’s why we focused on fixing small but meaningful usability issues that often go unnoticed, but have a big impact on the overall experience.
We tackled a list of quick wins: opening home detail pages in a new tab to preserve scroll position, fixing navigation dead ends, and making the entire home card on map view clickable. We also swapped the home name and tagline for clearer communication between guests and our travel specialists. These fixes may seem small on their own, but together, they created a smoother, more intuitive experience that made the platform feel more polished and trustworthy.
Research
To back our decisions with data, I combined both qualitative and quantitative research methods. These were some of the highlighted insights:
Result
One of the biggest lessons was the importance of communication and prioritization. In a fast-moving agile environment, it’s easy to jump from one thing to the next without pausing to reflect. But that can create confusion and snowball into bigger problems. Taking the time to align, share context, and map out user flows paid off in making smarter decisions and building shared understanding across the team.
Another key takeaway was around prioritization. There were tons of usability issues we wanted to fix, and plenty of voices in the room with different ideas. But with limited time, budget, and dev resources, we had to be strategic. It reminded me how important it is to advocate for design decisions that will truly move the needle.