Empathize

In the travel agency space, there are two personas: those who have sold travel before and those who haven’t. For both, onboarding to a travel supplier is a complicated and non-linear process that lacks direction. Customers are anxious to commit to a travel supplier when the process is touchless. They have many questions and crave human attention.

How Might We
Enable the sales team to focus on legitimate, profitable leads while simplifying the onboarding process for customers?

Define

When the project kicked off, we focused on new travel agents. We identified potential customers who were excellent candidates to begin careers as self-employed travel agents. These potential customers perceived travel agency businesses to be complex and old-fashioned. As they learned how to begin their own business, there was no well-defined path, so they got frustrated and gave up.

Our biggest challenge was an unforeseen and unavoidable circumstance: the pandemic.

We recognized an opportunity to support travel agents whose travel suppliers could not stay afloat during that season. Suddenly, we weren’t concerned with making travel “look cool” — we were consumed with helping agents migrate to a new travel supplier.

Time was not on our side, and a large portion of the company was furloughed. Thanks to this project, I was the only designer still working. For this project, I had to do everything: research the customer, learn our existing onboarding process, determine how to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace, then build an entirely new product that made changing travel suppliers feel easy, not daunting.

Ideate

In six weeks, our tiny, scrappy team designed, built and deployed our solution. The phrase “MVP” was never more meaningful.

We grabbed users’ attention with big, splashy images and prioritized a bare-bones customer intake form, whittling it down from 88 questions to 37 questions. We communicated with our applicants plainly and succinctly. Once we launched the product, we iterated. We refined our messaging to make it more informative. We introduced responsive design. We even circled back to care for our original user, the new agent.

Prototype & Test

I created prototypes and ran usability studies. While I learned many things from this project, my biggest takeaway was: never underestimate the power of a researcher.

Feedback was helpful and informative. Because our team was small, iterating was easy. I don’t have fancy reports or strong numbers from that time; we just focused on getting the job done.

I remain exceedingly proud of all we accomplished under the impossible circumstances.

Emily approaches problems with tenacity and refuses to give up until a workable solution is found. She has partnered with me on this project for almost a year now. Emily demonstrates passion in her desire to solve prospective customers’ problems and rigor to ensure we carefully considered the user design.

 

I have seen Emily tweak her direct approach into a pensive, collaborative style. She has served as a trusted thought partner and has gotten to the point where she knows the target audience so well that she can dream up designs with minimal input. She speaks up when she sees that something is off, even caring for minute details that seemingly won’t matter but yet have such an impact on the reputation of the site. She holds me, the dev team, the research team, and others accountable by working through the “what if” scenarios out loud. And she holds herself accountable for delivering quality work whether it’s the the first or 21st try.

 

Emily is a huge asset, and this product would not be where it is today without her talents.

S. Dunaway, Product Owner

The Team

I was the sole designer for the application from January 2020 through June 2021.

During this time, I collaborated with two product owners and a team of developers.

My personal responsibilities included:

• Creating all design deliverables
• Preparing prototypes
• Leading user studies
• Presenting solutions to the product team
• Providing specs to the developers