Virgin Holidays
Lead UX Designer
2016-2017
Responsible for:
- UX support across 4 development teams
- Coaching designers
Outputs:
- Customer Journey Map
- Concept development
- Prototyping
- Usability testing
Virgin Holidays was formed in 1985, initially selling seats on the then recently formed and highly successful Virgin Atlantic routes to New York City, Miami and Orlando. It specialises in long haul holidays with destinations including USA, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, India, the Indian Ocean, the Far East, Australia and the South Pacific.
It also has over 100 retail concessions throughout the UK in Debenhams, House of Fraser, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and pop-up shops already operating across the UK. These are supplemented by several standalone shops.
Currently the stores are still their most profitable touch point, but this trend is changing across the industry. According to ABTA, as many as 76% of people booked their holiday online in 2016, with most on desktops. I joined the team to help improve their customer experience across their digital touch points.
What I inherited
Virgin Holidays was in a very exciting place, they had recently been through a digital transformation programme to improve their digital and release capabilities. They moved from two releases a year to multiple teams releasing every 3 weeks and in some cases continuously.
However, design effort within these teams were under resourced, which was acknowledged. ClearLeft, a Brighton based design consultancy, were brought into help address this issue. I came in at a later stage to bring in some fresh thinking to their lean process and improve the validation and learning cycles within these rapid sprint cycles.
The challenge
When I arrived, there was a visual designer and UX designer assigned to each of the four sprint teams. The teams were very busy and although co-located, collaboration was still operating in silos more than was desired and the customer feedback loop mainly happened post build, via usage logs.
The aim: Establish ways to leverage customer feedback throughout the design process Ensure the value statement is at the heart of the design process. Improve NPS and conversion.
The approach
There was a lot of domain knowledge within the teams and business stakeholders. To capture and reflect all this knowledge and the number of great research reports, I created an experience map, blending in feedback sessions from customers during our research activities, usage logs, survey results, call centre logs and workshop feedback sessions with stakeholders.
This gave us a macro view of the business activities to address needs and gaps that we should address, captures customer needs and behaviours from post booking to holiday return.
Customer experience map
View here: https://invis.io/DQBPHSO9J
Delphi Method Card Sort
The original method was developed by the US military for forecasting during the Cold War. This looked like a great way to get consensus across multiple business stakeholders based across many locations.
I designed a remote card sort using Trello. After the 8th round there was general consensus reached with what felt like a logical content structure. To ensure that this wasn’t just business focussed we also repeated this with a traditional card sort with customers.
There were content gaps identified in this process which were fed into the overall experience map to ensure that if we didn’t have the priority to address those within the next few sprints, they are visible for later sprints.
Card sort output
Create narratives
There were a number of initiatives, that were explored, one was to improve perception and increase searches from users landing on the homepage. The other to improving self-serve and maximise the enjoyment potential of customers at their destination with a post booking hybrid mobile app service.
For the homepage and search initiative, I synthesised the workshop activities to help explore the ideas to refine with customers on to develop and iterate.
Post-its from homepage workshop
Desk research
Grouped scamps from the workshop
This allowed us to pull out some emerging themes and features.
Homepage workshop hypothesis and concept
I started to look at some of the ideas – firstly as what can we do right now. One of the hypothesis was that a vertical search is easier to interact with. The concept also looked at how the inspiration can flex with the selection of each of the holiday types.
Proposed vertical search concept
Current horizontal search for comparison
Holiday App
We were also tasked to build a post booking holiday app. This was to help holiday makers have direct access to holiday reps 24hrs a day.
I used narratives which were based on research and direct customer feedback on their challenges and behaviours. This allows us to create storyboards and scenarios which then can be translated into interaction flows.
Making use of personas
Flow based on customer narratives
Get questions answered, create user journey and build prototypes.
Storyboards and concept maps
Scamp out stories on how, when and where the app is used. These were iterated on as we refined the stories and used to inform the wireframes and initial designs.
Three concept models
We explored three versions and used a usability test framework to gauge which worked best.
Crib sheet for observers
As we were conducting a number of usability tests across number of projects, I encouraged the wider team to take part as observers. This helped structure notes and provide a participation framework for those new to this activity.
This also helped us collaborate and discuss our observations and really help with the team dynamic and a shared ownership and understanding. We utilised a lot of remote, unmoderated tests as these were quick to get feedback from, easier to organise and focused on a couple of key tasks.
What I learned
I had to work closely with the developers and business teams within the rapid delivery focused sprint cycles. There were content gaps, which required additional support which often couldn’t be met due to lack of time, budget, or due to the current limitations of the platform which was managed by a 3rd party.
This made the process of delivering value very challenging, the technical and operational compromises may not alleviate all the pain points but staying focused on the value we had to find alternative pragmatic ways to see if our hypothesises were successful, if we they were then we had a better case to make the costly business and technical process changes.
One thing that really helped was to expose the usability tests to the wider teams of business stakeholder and developers. I created a pretend usability lab in a large meeting room and played back some of the usability videos as if it were live session. I gave out a guide on what we were trying to learn and a crib sheet for making observations.