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Service Design Research UX

Secret Escapes

Self-serve booking amendments

Enabled customers to change the dates of their bookings.

About

On this project, I was a lead in multiple design disciplines to ensure the successful delivery of a new product and feature which enabled Secret Escapes customers to make changes to their existing bookings.

Role

Service Designer, Researcher, Product Designer, Content Designer

Objective

Changing a booking is effortless.

Key results

  • 60% of the amendments are done via self-serve means rather than contacting Customer Services
  • Task success of self-serve amendments is 80% or higher
  • 90% customer satisfaction with the self serve-amendments service

Main takeaways

  • The standard design sprint format can be modified to accommodate further and more powerful technical discovery early on
  • The key results we chose to monitor can be iterated on in order to have progress metrics as well as success metrics. This would ensure higher engagement and motivation in the team, as well as a sense of achievement and urgency

Process

  • Research and alignment
  • Organise and run a design sprint
  • Discovery and delivery plan
  • Delivery support and future vision
  • Measure UX

Artefacts

  • Design sprint board
  • User journey maps
  • Service blueprints
  • Multiple prototypes
  • UX performance measures

Results

86%
Of booking amendments were self served post launch.
96%
Achieved in customer satisfaction with the new service.
83%
Achieved in task success rate.
Bookign amendments

Bookign amendments

Key Decisions

01
Technical investiagation

I ensured the engineers considered all difficult scenarios early on, to make sure directions are explored and considered.

02
Decoupling the font end

During the course of this work, another team was working on decoupling the front end which meant step change had to happend gradually and in close collaboration with other teams.

03
Cross disciplinary collaboration

I led sessions with people across the business to endsure all customer touch points communicate the new feature clearly and coherently.

Process

1. Research and alignment

We carried out multiple research activities that complimented each other and validated our hypothesis that it would be valuable for both our customers and internal users to have a feature that enables people to make changes on their bookings. My role in this step consisted of summarising the research findings and facilitating the decision-making process in choosing the path forward.

Research

2. Organise and run a design sprint

Once we were aligned on the objective and measurement of success, we were in a position to explore the problem space and ask the big questions. To enable the team to do so, I proposed to organise and run a design sprint. The outcome of which we used to inform our discovery and delivery roadmap.

Design sprint story boarding

3. Discovery and delivery plan

By the end of the design sprint, we acquired valuable learnings from a user and a technical perspective. I used those learnings to facilitate and support in visualising our discovery and delivery roadmap.

Planning

4. Delivery support and future vision

In this phase of the project, my role consisted of working closely with the engineers in order to deliver the solution I designed and make lean iterations along the way when needed, while the team was building the increments. At the same time, part of my focus was concentrated on answering unknowns that needed to be addressed before the delivery plan got more concrete. These unknowns included questions regarding existing product policies and their impact on the user experience. Communication and alignment were key.

5. Measure UX

For us to know we have delivered a valuable experience, we needed to measure the performance of the UX we built. For this, I used two methods — task success measurement and CSAT. We were able to establish the success rate and time on task for the two key user needs in this flow. The results helped us inform future improvements and review our OKRs with a sense of achievement.

Success

Success