Designing travel experiences with the best-in-class UX team

A BIT OF CONTEXT

eDreams ODIGEO is the largest online travel group in Europe, and the largest distributor of online flights in the world. It has over 18.5 million customers in 43 countries with 40,000 destinations and 575 airlines. With offices in Barcelona and Madrid, the company sells flights, hotels, vacation packages (flight and hotel), train tickets, car rentals, and travel insurance.

I can say without any doubt that eDreams Odigeo was where I officially become a mature product designer. I had the privilege to work with a talented UX team composed of product designers, content designers, data analyst, researchers and brand designers.

At this company I started as a product designer with focus on travel booking apps for iOS and Android and innovation.

TEAM ORGANIZATION

eDreams Odigeo is an agile company with different teams where each one is focuses on different parts of the user journey. Overall each team is composed by one product owner, one or two product designers and a range of four to six developers.

RESEARCH

The UX team was skilled in research and we were used to interview users and design workshops with them. In fact, each week we had the "User Thursday day" where we were responsible to bring our hypotheses prototyped to be tested by our colleagues in order to obtain objective learnings.

If that day I did not have prototypes or ideas to test, then I was in charge of conducting the research session for my colleagues. Depending the research questions that we wanted to answer, we adapted the qualitative research method.

PRODUCT DESIGN MEASURABLE

All the product decisions were discussed with a very high level of granularity. For each idea the product team define a risk profiling measuring customer value, delay impact based on EBITDA margin and other variables that help to decide if the idea was worth prioritizing.

Check it out some travel experiences that I've designed

A travel companion for the Apple Watch

A BIT OF CONTEXT

After the famous Apple keynote where Tim Cook introduced the Apple Watch in 2014, the company held me responsible to design the first app for the Apple Watch of eDreams Odigeo in order to be the first online travel agency in Europe to have a travel companion for the smartwatch.

GOALS AND CHALLENGES

The Apple Watch was a totally a new device for everyone.
Apart from the brand positioning for the company, one of the things that it was my concern, it was offering enough value even if it was a first app version.

DESIGN

After some brainstormings with the product team and bearing in mind the user needs that we had previously identified in our apps, we decided to go with the following features in this order of priority:

1. Departure time of your flight
2. Flight details (using digital crown to see details)
3. Weather destination
4. Time destination
5. Currency destination
6. Departure airport map of your flight

In technical terms, the official design guidelines for the Apple Watch they were very limited. Basically, I deduced watching the Apple's keynote what kind of experience we can offer to our clients and I assumed the type of interactions and design that was possible. Even for developers, the documentation was not enough and they had to investigate through the Xcode (development environment of iOS, WatchOS, etc.) what were the possibilities and limitations.

ANIMATIONS DESIGN

I'm not specialized in animations, but the Apple Watch, it was a good opportunity for me to try new ways to communicate with a new device so I decided design some animations to delight the user experience.

A WARM WELCOME

On the other hand, I designed a walkthrough to manage the user expectations for the users that didn't have any trip yet, motivating them to book with us so they can start to enjoy the new features.

RESULTS AND LEARNINGS

The first version of the app was enough successful to be announced by the CEO at the Phocuswright Europe conference in 2015 (Phocuswright Europe is the leading authority in travel, tourism and hospitality market research).

Watch the video of the app presentation.

Technical summary

What I did
Research.
Prototype design. 
Design of the Apple Watch app for all the eDreams Odigeo brands.

Year
2014 - 2015

Where
eDreams Odigeo headquarters, Barcelona and Madrid.