Morty bookings: reimagining escape room reservations
My Role
As Director of Product Management for Morty, I served as Project Owner for the development of this feature. Working closely with the CEO, I led the product team through the end-to-end development process from research through launch and beyond. During the project, I personally conducted user research, oversaw every step of the design and implementation processes, created the feature’s lexical system, and worked with data science to leverage an A/B testing and feature improvement loop.
What is Morty?
Morty is the most popular app for finding, tracking, and reviewing every immersive attraction on Earth. Launched in 2021, partially to address the social isolation many felt coming out of the pandemic, Morty seeks to reduce collective loneliness, while providing users with the ultimate tool to do the things they love.
While Morty’s plan is to eventually add every type of modern, immersive entertainment attraction out there, the product is currently focused on two of the most popular verticals in the space: escape rooms and haunts.
Morty is the only app that allows its users to easily find, play, and track nearly every escape room in the world. With over 60k experiences in its database, Morty has the most expansive collection of escape room information in the industry.
The Opportunity
There are over 2,000 escape room venues in the US alone, generating over $8 billion in annual revenue. The vast majority of escape rooms require customers to book their experience in advance, and over 80% of those reservations are made online. For customers not using Morty, this means booking directly on the escape room’s website, a task that can be quite difficult for even the most tech-savvy among us.
An obviously easier and faster booking experience would be a major draw for users - both existing and potential - to book through Morty instead of directly with the venues. And as the escape rooms’ new key sales funnel, Morty would be able to charge a healthy commission rate on each sale.
All this equates to an enormous market opportunity for Morty, the only escape room aggregator of its kind.
The Problems
User side: How do we create a booking experience that is a 20x improvement over the current options?
Owner side: How do we make Morty bookings more financially attractive than their current sales funnels? (more on this another time)
The process: Building a better booking experience
As Project Owner for this implementation, I led the team through our 0 to 1 launch process. For this, I employed the double diamond approach to product development, which provides an excellent framework for ensuring that 1) the core problem is fully understood and considered before advancing to potential solutions 2) a wide breadth of potential solutions are considered before identifying the preferred approach, and 3) the initial product addresses the core problem and does not include extraneous elements that do not contribute to the goals at hand.
Discover
We began with a deep dive into the existing booking experience that users were accustomed to. We interviewed users and owners to gain insights from both sides of the marketplace, watched hours of app session recordings and ran deep data analyses to better understand how our users find and choose the rooms they wanted to play.
The competitive analysis phase was next; this was a step that I pushed the team to go the extra mile on. I wanted to better understand not just how other escape room aggregators were handling bookings, but how reservation platforms in other industries provided superior UX.
The team walked through the booking experience on dozens of escape rooms’ sites, documenting the strengths and weaknesses of each to identify the problems facing customers attempting to reserve these experiences digitally. But we didn’t stop there; we also tried calling to book at a number of locations to better understand the conveniences and drawbacks of alternative booking experiences. If our booking experience offered the flexibility of ‘call to book’ embedded within the convenience of digital reservations, we could establish a clear competitive advantage that results in the 20x improvement we’re looking for.
When conducting this competitive analysis, the top questions on my mind were:
When and how does the first moment of delight arrive and do others follow later in the flow?
What does this platform do well and why or why not are those things applicable to our product based on our user- and business-case differences?
What pain points exist within the experience and how can we improve upon them?
After an expansive exploration, we settled on three key tangential products as our key sources of inspiration: Airbnb, Gametime, and SeatGeek
The key products we used to inspire our bookings UI (from left to right: Airbnb, Gametime, and SeatGeek)
Define
As a next step, I enlisted the help of the data science team to conduct several studies on our existing users and potential users based on industry research to better understand 1) the use cases we needed to address with this feature 2) the common challenges others have faced when trying to provide seamless event checkout experiences, and 3) what drives people to purchase tickets in the moment.
After sifting through the multitude of data and qualitative insights, we arrived at these key findings:
Bookings require many decisions: reduce the number to the minimum required by pre-filling where possible
Hub screen + modals beats a wizard every time
Users are drawn to value above all else
Scarcity is the ultimate booking incentive
While evaluating the findings from our competitive analysis, I sought to define the key user personas that were expected to use this booking feature. Although based on our general user personas for the overall product, these personas differed in that their motivation to use the product was not one in the same - discovery and tracking were main motivators for existing Morty users, but these personas needed to reflect a motivation to book.
Armed with our insights into competitive products and understanding of our target users, I led the team through the process of narrowing the scope of initial feature set from the universe of ideas down to the most critical components needed to address the problem at hand. A lot of great ideas were set aside during this process, some until post-launch, some forever. But through this we arrived at a solution we had conviction would be easy to use, but powerful enough to handle all the critical user needs.
develop
Having thoroughly dissected the problem at hand, the team proceeded with the solution phase of the project. Based on our decision during the prior phase to pursue the Airbnb and Gametime UX model of a single checkout screen, we know that getting that screen right would be the most critical aspect of the entire booking flow. For this reason, we began our design process by conducting a broad exploration of this screen.
The final design of the checkout screen was largely inspired by Gametime’s UI, with some modifications for Morty’s use case.
The design team created several versions of the screen based on each inspiration product. Some versions were near-reproductions of the inspiration, others were hybrids or incorporated original ideas.
We zeroed in on our final choice by simulation testing the candidate designs and selected the one that performed best among independent testers in terms of their intuitive understanding of how they would complete desired actions within the presented design.
From there, we developed the user flow map, accounting for the various paths a user could take in terms of flow origin points, potential reservation modifications, and edge cases we identified. We recognized that we had a unique opportunity to be the first escape room ticketing system that provided an end-to-end experience by building the user flow to continue after the game had been played and automatically logging the experience for the user in their profile.
In parallel with this work, the backend engineering team built out new database tables and APIs to handle the storage and flow of data to and from the client. These additions needed to be precisely retrofit to work with the already expansive data schema that drove the product to ensure a smooth end-to-end experience.
From there, the design of the remaining screens, modals, embeds, and other elements proceeded quickly, guided by the methodical decisions we made earlier in the process. As each segment of the user flow came to life in the design, it was again simulation tested for usability, uncovering numerous issues and opportunities that were prioritized and addressed to ensure a strong day 1 product experience.
deliver
With the full scope of designs nearing completion, the PM team got to work documenting the long list of requirements, logic complexities, and integration hookups needed to build this feature. Regarding integrations, this feature required two distinct integrations, one to the internal booking systems used by the escape rooms themselves and the second to the company’s payment processor, Stripe. The product team worked closely with engineering to ensure proper coordination between our system and those external systems that would be critical to success.
As new elements were added each day, the team deeply tested the growing prototype, which helped to uncover additional edge cases and other UX issues that needed to be addressed before launch.
Once every screen was added, every API hooked up, every tracking event layered in, we released bookings to a small group of beta testers. During the three week beta period, we ran numerous A/B tests on a multitude of UI elements to optimize the the performance of the flow. We found that certain CTAs performed far better than others, that some buttons needed to be repositioned or better highlighted, and that the promo code submission experience was overlooked by a concerning portion of users.
When bookings went live across the user base, we were thrilled to see that it was a hit. While adoption started off a little slower than we hoped, as users became acclimated to the paradigm shift of their tracking app now being a monetized marketplace, booking sales soared.
Metrics
19% portion of users who booked an escape room in the first 30 days post-launch (of those located within vicinity of a bookable venues)
37% likelihood of a user who completed a booking to book again within 60 days
$168 average value of a booking through Morty vs. $147 industry-wide average
$4.9k average monthly GMV per location among bookable venues
Key takeaways
Understanding the problem is much more important than perfectly executing the solution - you can far more easily improve a feature that solves something important than you can get customers to use something great that is not valuable to their lives.
When conducting a competitive analysis for product development, you must seek to understand the reasoning behind why UI/UX decisions were made by the inspiration products to ensure congruency with your users.
Usability and clarity testing by fresh eyes during the design phase is among the best ways to avoid building experiences that are unintuitive.
Expect the adoption curve of a feature that alters the paradigm of a product to be slower at first as users adjust their perception of the product’s value proposition.