DURATIONSummer 2023 (Five weeks)
TOOLS USEDFigma, Miro
my team
Over the summer of 2023, I joined Expedia Group as a UX Design intern, working towards their mission of powering global travel through technology. As a member of the Marketplace Ready team, my focus was on creating and elevating onboarding experiences for Expedias partners (airlines, hotels, vacation homes, cruise lines, and car rental companies) in order to set them up for success within the travel marketplace serving millions of travelers around the globe.
the power of previews
It can be difficult to know how best to represent your product or service to customers when you don’t know what they are looking for. How do you tailor your listing in a way that targets your customers needs and expectations? How can the listing tool itself help you create more effective listings?
There had been a long history of Expedias’ partners asking for ways to get a fuller picture of what their property listing looks like from a travelers point of view using a preview feature. My goal was to identify where this need was coming from and determine strategies around how Expedia can use it as a tool to bridge the gap between their partners and the travelers interested in their properties. Throughout my design process, I gradually distilled user needs and identified design recommendations through iterative exploration.
building an understanding of the user needs
To get a clear idea of the existing problem space and better understand partner’s experience with setting up and maintaining listings, I started by engaging in some cross-team collaboration and secondary research. Through this, I was able to chip away at the two big questions driving the exploration.
why do partners want previews?
I set up virtual chats with UX Researchers from across the company to gather existing internal research documentation that touched on previews, reviews, or the Expedia listing experience. In one study in particular, all 7 of the users interviewed wanted to see a listing preview.
what needs aren’t being met by not having previews?
I performed a competitive analysis and feature decomposition, breaking down the makeup of other preview and review implementations across other onboarding user flows. The goal here was to identify how the design of previews changed depending on evolving user needs.
framing research through ideation
With primary research questions now identified, I facilitated a traveler preview exploration workshop with a group of 6 designers, product managers, and engineers. I started by presenting my research findings to provide some context, and then guided the group in the creation of “How Might We” statements. Then, using the HMW’s, I had participants do a Crazy 8’s design activity to explore a range of use cases. Finally, we engaged in open discussion, talking through their decisions during the design activity and noting reflections.
the job of a preview
The collaborative ideation from the workshop coupled with my intial secondary research came together to produce a Jobs to Be Done framework to support the creation of a roadmap to incrementally build towards an onboarding experience armed with previews.
blue sky design exploration
With the jobs-to-be-done outlined I now had a clear vision of where and what the goals of a preview implemention should be. Using the ideas generated from the workshop and the key catgeories as guidelines, I began sketching out low-fidelity design solutions and categorized them based on a variety of spectrums to determine the optimal configuration of previews that met these goals.
I then got input from product, engineering, researchers, and other designers to judge each preview implementation on a set of goal criteria, helping to reframe and refine user needs and goals addressed by each.
For a guided experience that focuses on coaching, provide mini annotated previews of existing high performing listings.
This stage includes the onboarding and listing creation flow that partners go through when setting up their profile and new listing. The goal of previews at this stage is to supplement and inform the listing creation process. To accomplish this the preview must:
- Communicate what makes listings successful
- Show examples of high quality listing content to reference
- Contextualize the onboarding questions
- Communicate and manage expectations for the rest of the listing experience