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

Relevant information at a glance

A BIT OF CONTEXT

In 2015, Google was putting a lot of efforts to improve their AI and predict what the user want or need to know before he knows he need or want it.

For this reason, Google wanted to add new features on their virtual assistant called Google Now and serve the predictions in an easy-to-read format on Android devices in the form of informational cards.

In summer of 2015, part of the product team was invited by Google 3 days to their offices in Berlin to work on the Google cards for their virtual assistant.

Google Now branding is no longer used, but the functionality continues in the Google app and currently is called Google Feed.

GOALS AND CHALLENGES

There was a lot of uncertainty to deal with. Google was planning to launch a stable release on October (2015) and we were waiting to see what the Google team explained to us to see what we could offer to our customers. 

LEARNING FAST

The Google team gave us a series of lectures to learn how to build the Google cards in terms of user experience and development. Fortunately, we were not alone. More product teams from other companies and countries were open to exchange knowledge and ideas to produce some features that we assume that could work for our customers.

DESIGN

After some brainstormings with the product team, we decided work in 3 strategic areas of the customer journey:

1. Discovery phase: When the user is looking for flights.
2. Engagement: When the user is looking for the best deal.
3. Post-purchase: When the user has booked a flight.

Bearing in mind this I designed some cards, and the most important where these three ones:

- A card with travel suggestions based on the flights the user searched.
- A card with changes on flight prices that the user searched.
- A card with weather information about your next flight and the possibility to book a hotel or rent a car if the user did not.

User interface

The UI was strictly designed following the Google material design guidelines and the Card builder software (a tool for developers provided by Google).

Below you will see some cards that I designed during our visit at Google and the developers implented. The cards are focus on travel suggestions bearing in mind your searches, changes in flight prices and contextual information about your next trip.

Do you want to know more?
For further details don't hesitate to contact me through LinkedIn.

Technical summary

What I did
Design of Google cards.

Year
2015

Where
Google offices, Berlin.