Designing a travel experience by discovering travelers needs for interaction

Client                                            Year
MijnSubsidie                             2015-2017

Role
Digital design & UI/UX 
(Homepage, subsidy scanner, dashboard module)

The story

When travel is purely functional, it needs to be an almost unnoticeable, part of your day. Our travel manager understood this. 'They provide travel management for companies and provide several tools for their travelers to support and guide them on their journey. Knowing it can be an extreme pain, the perfect no-hassle, traveling and booking experience could prove invaluable.

The challenge

“What would the best in-class customer experience look like based on people’s experiences and needs when interacting with a travel arranger?”

My role

I was part of the six-man Livework design team. I carried out interviews, mapped our findings and the perceived experiences on to the journeys and translated a lot of what people told us into insights. I filled in a part of the ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ journeys, based on the impressions from all participants. Later, I helped sharpen our high-level concepts around those journeys, after having collaboratively identified the opportunity spaces.

The approach

Phase 1: understanding customer needs
Our team needed to get the know the customers first phase of this project so we did extensive traveler interviews. We’ve plotted all of our findings in a customer journey that would reflect the current situation and their feelings of people on their travel services.

To include cultural diversity, we interviewed over 12 business travelers and travel arrangers from Australia, the U.S. and I flew to Paris to speak with them face to face. 

After analyzing plotting the statements in our 'as-is' journey we started with the sensemaking. A selection of our gained insights:

Phase 2: deliver a 'to-be' journey
Having established a good understanding of the current situations and desires of business travellers we set out to break them down into our ‘to-be’ journey. 

“The 'to-be' journey contained what travellers should feel, where they needed support and through which channels could be used to enhance their experience.”

Phase 3: imagining 3 future service strategies
To tie the whole project together  we created three high-level concepts, keeping in mind the hidden-potential we uncovered. These concepts can inform the future strategy and can be used to further orchestrate the set-up of their communication channels.

"We came up with 3 concepts that could improve the customer experience via their channels"

1. Ever improving profile

The ever improving profile uses the information the traveller puts in the profile, the travellers history, and their colleagues’ patterns to optimize the booking and travel experience.

How might we personalise the preference choice
and experience?

2. One go-to place

The ‘one go-to place’ concept enables the traveler to book their travel over a span of time, with functionalities such as save draft, share a draft, rebook previous travels or do a multi-person booking.

How might we make the booking process easy to use and reliable?

3. Travel companion       app

The ‘one go-to place’ concept enables the traveler to book their travel over a span of time, with functionalities such as save draft, share a draft, rebook previous travels or do a multi-person booking.

How might we demonstrate the value GBT can offer throughout the whole journey??

Not all materials, such as these last recommendations and the details of every concept are shown because of the confidentiality agreement. 

Credits

Livework team                                       
Sanne Pelgröm
Anu Hanekroot
Ben Reason
Lilly Graf
                                                   
 
         

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