The Problem:

The traveller’s basic shopping journey consists of flights, accommodation, transfers and activities.

Excite Holidays’ core product is accommodation. But to keep the user engaged with the business from end-to-end we were missing out on the first stage of the booking process – Flights – and therefore risking that the traveler would book the other hotels and activities items within another platform.

The new flights shopping product was built by a small team: one front-end developer (angular), a business analyst, a back-end developer and product designer (myself).

I reported directly to the CTO (who was enthusiastic about moving to a more user-centered design approach) and CEO (who was focused on the more visible aspects of design) with the key stakeholders being the VP Head of Global Sales & Operations.

Research

Defining the flight shopping product’s scope & objectives was done by uncovering the needs and issues that were facing our users & stakeholders.

The discovery process began with informal stakeholder interviews, competitor analysis and industry UI pattern research.

After completing a competitor analysis and UI pattern investigation I was able to present to stakeholders and team members an informed analysis of the different user flows and journeys used by our competitors.

Define & Design

Working alongside the Business Analyst with the design tool Sketch I began to build designs based around online travel agency (OTA) patterns.

After blocking in the basic UI locations such as filters and cards we started to utilise the research, analysis and stakeholder feedback to define the details of the design needed to help our users move successfully through their journey.

Using InvisionApp as the prototyping tool I recreated the user journey into an interactive prototype which was used for stakeholder feedback as well as easing the handover to the developer.

By introducing the flights shopping experience to Excite Holidays we were able to start looking more seriously at package deals across flights, accommodation and transfers.