Booking.com partner verification

Project description

In order to meet various regulatory requirements, Booking.com has to verify its business partners. Similar to how a bank performs KYC checks, Booking.com requires its accommodation partners to complete a form and get verified in order to keep their property listings on the site.

Booking.com’s video that explains what information our partners need to provide in the form

We knew that this process had to be simple enough for our users to go through quickly. But this was a big challenge because

  • legal language and requirements are not easily understood by the average user;

  • the product has to handle country-specific personal and business identification systems; and

  • the company has to comply with multiple regulations with different requirements.

Key achievements

As the first UX writer to join the Regtech track, I started from the ground up. After working on compliance initiatives for 2.5 years, some of my personal highlights include:

  • Setting up a UX workflow that enabled us to collaborate effectively with multiple teams including Product, Tax, and Partner services.

  • Building a product experience and communications strategy that enabled over a million partners (and counting) to get verified and continue doing business on our site.

  • Reducing the input of bad quality tax-related information from 23% to 0.1% via localisation efforts.

Setting up a UX framework

As compliance projects require multiple teams to collaborate closely and deliver quickly, it was crucial that we established a UX workflow in order to meet business goals.

  • Set up a Jira product for UX tasks to keep our tasks on track. Product managers and developers appreciated that they could use a tool they were familiar with to get a deeper insight into how we worked.

  • Deepened collaboration by hosting weekly meetings where writers and designers can share work — regardless of which stage it’s at — with product and engineering colleagues. This created a continuous feedback loop that helped to smoothen handovers to developers.

  • Formalised a cyclical and often asynchronous workflow to align with cross-functional teams based across several countries. This involved a mix of templated UX documentation, recorded walkthroughs on Zoom, face-to-face meetings, and standardised approval processes. I’ve received feedback from stakeholders — Product, Engineering, Legal, Finance, Partner services and Marketing colleagues — that these have helped them gain clarity into complicated projects.

Building a product experience and communications strategy

Throughout the product development cycle, I worked alongside different teams to deliver the best user experience as possible within the time and resource constraints placed upon us.

User research

  • Understand partners’ expectations of communications and in-product experience around compliance tasks

  • Assess comprehension of our prototypes

Product development

  • Collaborate with business partners to plan initiatives and refine product requirements

  • Worked with PMs, designers, developers, compliance officers to create the customer verification experience

  • Built a localised library for tax-related terminology

Improve and scale

  • Used email metrics, web analytics, and user feedback to inform and prioritise UX improvements

  • Champion dynamic UX solutions that reduce operational costs and are future-proof