Product Designer

Travel romantic helping others to discover the world of possibilities they live on and have a good time doing it.

I apply my background in psychology to product design by bringing an understanding of how our perception and attention work into the design process. I love creating data-driven solutions, that's why I apply a continuous process of learning from users and data.

My conversion optimization skills have been developed while working for travel industry leaders whose traffic counts in millions. Connect with me to talk about product design opportunities.

Design strategy

After the experience of COVID-19 and its impact on business operations in terms of largescale cancelations and the required customer support to resolve issues there was a growing consciousness within the business to invest in the post-booking experience and enable customer self-service. One of the biggest projects to achieve this was designing a new manage booking page.

Before starting the project, it was important to find out why Ryanair customers contact Customer Service, if they were interested in self-serving online and what’s preventing them to do so. A quantitative survey was run with 2,441 respondents on a random group of customers that have flown with Ryanair in the last month. The results were largely impacted by COVID. The main reason for contacting CS was changing booking details (along with COVID). 90% of customers contacting CS reviewed the website/app before to check if their query/issue could be self-managed, of those ​81% declare that the query could not be solved on the website (due to lack of information, technical issues, individual concerns, and misleading information on the website related to changing flights and/or refunds). ​From the 19% who could solve it using the website 33% had additional questions and 20% needed reassurance. These results indicate a clear desire from customers to self-serve online, but that the current website does not allow them to do so successfully.

A data analysis was also conducted on tagging done by CS agents when resolving customer issues. This indicated that managing a booking represented the number 1 reason for contacts equalling 36% of all chats and calls conducted in 52 weeks (based on a pre-covid data sample). From the manage booking category 15% were relating to confirming booking details (like products/dates/status) and the rest were related to specific functionalities like change passenger type (child/teen/adult) with 8%, change flight with 6% or changing a name with 3% for example. This data indicates that users are unable to check basic booking information and complete certain functionalities which could be indicative of bad information architecture and a complex design.

Following the data indicated there were problems with the current website which is why a UX heuristics and best practices analysis was conducted to help identify these problems in order to resolve them during the redesign. The current page has a complex information architecture because there is an illogical separation of information about your trip and actions to modify this or add new products. This makes the page hard to navigate and it is not intuitive to use.

After having identified user problems with the current page and before starting the redesign process it was important to get a more in-depth understand of why users come back to an airlines website after they’ve bought their flight, what they are hoping to accomplish and what their ideal post-booking experience would look like. A brief interview with 12 customers was conducted to find this out. Most users go back to the website where they booked their flights generally to check if everything is correct with their booking (flight dates and times, seats, bags, meals) and the flights are still scheduled on time. There seems to be a sort of anxiety or a “trust issue” that’s driving these visits so there wouldn’t be any surprises during their travels. Any additional tasks they wanted to accomplish were usually related to modifying or adding products like seats or bags. Most users described an ideal experience with words like “simple”, “quick log in”, “easy to read”, “one simple page” with all relevant information and “everything laid out”. The emphasis is on not wanting to look for information or having anything too “fancy”.

Based on the data and research the main logic behind this new redesign is to present the users with all the information about their upcoming trip in the simplest form and provide them quick and easy access to modifying and adding new things to their trip. Most of the users will benefit from this and be more secure about what they have booked for their upcoming trip.

Another main objective of this project is to try and improve the experience of users that have a certain problem. Based on the survey results 90% of users try to self-serve before getting in contact with CS. Therefore, another big addition to this redesign is the inclusion of quick help articles next to relevant functionality that will provide most important information for possible problems based on issues customers most commonly get in contact with CS for. This is a great example of proactive customer support where we anticipate the problems users might have and help solve them before they escalate.

Considering flight cancelations are one of the highest contact drivers for CS and probably the most stressful situation for customers designing a clear and easy way to manage this situation was critical. The redesign in this scenario follows the main logic as well, we present clearly which flight is affected and right bellow we offer the possible solutions with quick help articles that answer questions or calm doubts users might have. This is all encouraging users to self-serve and resolve their cancelation quickly and easily. A worthy note is the inclusion of a new quick option to accept an alternative flight, these would be offered if there are available flights on the same route +/- 1 day of the original flight. This way users can solve the situation with just 1 click and enjoy their trip without any further stress.

Findings

A round of unmoderated users testing was performed on the main design and cancelled flight scenario to verify the usability of the solution.

The results were excellent, and all the testers could complete all of the tasks which were based on the identified top contact drivers to CS (e.g. check basic booking data like baggage allowance, change a flight, change name…).

One improvement that came up was making the search bar sticky when users scroll down the screen so they always have a clear call to action if they need any help as users couldn’t remember anymore where they can search on the page once they were further down.

Additionally, a moderated user testing was conducted with 6 Ryanair customers that were in contact with CS previously. They were presented with the same set of tasks to complete both on the redesign and the current website. The order in which they viewed the versions was randomized so that any bias because of this might be avoided.

Overall, the new design received very positive feedback (this was more accentuated when seeing it after the current website), users said it was “Easier to user”, “Huge improvement. Much less cluttered and better organized” and they especially liked the easy access to chat and open customer service requests. Testers rated their global satisfaction with a 9.2/10, the ease-of-use 8.6/10 and the appeal 9.6/10. In comparison the current website was considered cluttered, and users found the layout to be inconsistent, critically 2 users couldn’t find out what their baggage allowance was on the booking (mirroring the contact drivers for CS data analysis where 15% of customers were getting in contact to find out basic booking information). Testers rated their global satisfaction with a 8/10, the ease-of-use 7.8/10 and the appeal 7/10.

Design strategy

For an airline whose business model is based of having the lowest fares upselling higher priced fares which include ancillary services represents quite a challenge but also an incredible opportunity for increasing revenues. The business request for this project was focused on exactly that, upselling fares to customers in a personalized way. The current mobile web design was limited in its ability to inform users on the benefits of the higher priced fares.

A Hotjar poll with 2,469 respondents was run to get quick insights before starting the ideation and design phase. 36.2% responded that they did not pay attention to the different fares offered to them and 22.1% of those said it was because there was too much text. Additionally from the 63.8% that responded they paid attention to the fares and rated them as unclear 40% said the benefits of buying a fare versus adding ancillary services individually could be better explained. Such findings from the poll suggest there is still space for improvement on how we upsell fares for a substantial amount of users.

The key to finding a good solution was thinking of what could help users make sense of the different fares offered to them, help guide their choice and at the same time upsell the fares to increase revenue. Considering that at this step in the booking flow we already knew a considerable amount of information about the trip the user is looking to book and they have already been prompted to log in it seemed logical to make use of all this information to come up with a recommendation.

The main change to this page would be the addition of an indicator called “Trip fit”, a 3 level rating scale that is represented visually to indicate how well a certain fare fits your trip. A pretty simple yet effective solution for helping guide users between the options they have. Imagine it as the evolution of the well know tag “Recommended”. Presenting the recommendation as a scale along with included explanations of the rating makes it seem more objective and trustworthy.

Findings

Unmoderated user testing proved the concept a success. It replicated results from the Hotjar survey where it was clear only a part of the users were paying attention to the fares, the same was obvious when observing how users reacted to the Trip fit rating when interacting with the page naturally. There were two groups of users.

The first group of users didn’t interact with Trip fit while booking a flight (later on when asked one user said its good for unexperienced travellers but not her, another user found it “patronizing”). These users self-described themselves as experienced, price conscious and deals driven travellers. Another issue they raised was trust as they don’t trust Ryanair to make an honest suggestion. These users probably fall within the category of people that answered in the Hotjar poll that they don’t pay attention to the fares because they always go for the cheapest option or they already knew the best option for them. Because of this group of users it necessary not to use any negative language while implementing the rating, like for example “Bad trip fit”.

The other group of users were intrigued by a new element on the page, interacted with it naturally (with no previous direction to do so) and generally had a positive view about the rating afterwards (they understood it as a recommendation based on previous purchases, which they found as the most convincing argument).

Design strategy

The business request was that of increasing and diversifying the amount of content in the current platform. A natural way forward for a business that aggregates tourism content and offers it through diverse channels.

However, this might not be so natural for travelers just trying to get from the airport to their hotel. Interviewing leisure travelers showed they don’t give much thought about how to go from one spot to the next within cities, after all it’s a quick trip and they have the speed and simplicity of old-fashioned taxies, modern ride hailing services like Uber and Google Maps to help them get around. The main concern coming from these insights was how do we present all these options to users without overwhelming them?

This is a great example of why we need a deep understanding of how our users brains function when designing solutions. Hick’s Law, the simple idea that says that the more choices you present your users with, the longer it will take them to reach a decision makes this clear. Our monster platform needed to compete with very simple and quick solutions.

A comparative analysis with products such as Google Maps, Omio, Rome2Rio made the direction of where we’re placing our product clearer. Even though the different categories could have different search queries it was important to try and standardize them as much as possible so that users only need to search one and compare the variety of content. Next was thinking of what would help users make sense of all these different options. A simple, familiar solution came to mind. Why not group the different options into categories and display the minimum price and time for each of them to help organize the information and make it easier to select the best option for yourself? Why do I say a familiar solution? Because it’s something we all use almost every day, it’s how Google Maps works. Using a familiar interaction pattern will make our product more intuitive and easier to use for new users. I built on this foundation further based feedback from the business side that we needed to solve how to enable more service providers to be seen and how they can differentiate themselves with something other than price. The results card would be designed to focus on providers, their main distinguishing service features and starting price. This way service providers would be more enticed to join the platform and users could more easily compare the different options.

Trying to fulfill the business requirements by taking into consideration how this will affect the user helped not only solve how to present this large amount of information to users but added a distinguishing feature to our product when compared to direct competitors (being able to easily compare different transportation categories).

Findings

Users were somewhat confused as to what exactly our website is for, they understood it was for transportation but the exact categories they didn’t know. This made it clear that we needed to leave extra space for explaining the service we offer at the top of the landing page.

Navigating and understanding the functionality of the results page was extra clear and easy for everyone, following an existing, well known interaction patter paid off. This was also what users described as the biggest advantage of using the website, being able to compare different transportation options easily. In its current form as a website users considered it a great trip planning tool that they would recommend friends to use it, they even saw value in using it together with friends while planning a trip and recommended to add a share button for social media on a specific result.

Users also revealed that our expectation of them using the mobile version of the website in the moment of travelling was unrealistic. Planning to include ride hailing services in the platform was not enough to make this viable, especially because there were several features that we couldn’t compete with when compared to the established players with quick and simple apps (like storing personal information so they wouldn’t need to fill in payment details or enabling push notifications). The conclusion was that we are not competitive enough in terms of user experience to include ride hailing services and that we need to focus on finding ways to minimize the biggest pain point in general for users on our website, entering data (like paying through PayPal or by enabling scanning of credit cards).