Xplor

Product Design Lead

Simplifying communication between travel agents and clients for personalized trip planning

What is the nature of group communication during travel planning?

In group travel planning, groups must manually consolidate individual preferences with expectations in order to reach consensus and make decisions. In doing so, they are plagued by indecisiveness because they lack relevant information about their group as a whole. Invariably, one person always gets tired of waiting and steps up as the leader to makes decisions for the entire group.

Therefore, group travel planning is indefinite, inefficient and authoritarian.

BACKGROUND

Xplor wanted to facilitate a better communication between the travel agents and the customer group members. It will reduce the turnaround time between interactions and provide travel agents with better data to help their customers.

How can both travel agents & customer groups benefit from such an arrangement?

To understand how both sides could benefit from such an arrangement, we conducted interviews. We interviewed 2 stakeholders to understand travel agents pain points. Then we interviewed 6 users to understand the group planning pain points.

How does the interaction between agents and customers happen?

We created a workflow for the group planning process and identified pain points causing breakdown in the process.We found that the biggest bottleneck in this process was communicating interests and preferences of individual group members to the travel agent. This was a critical part of the process that consumed the maximum amount of time and energy, and most customers would drop-out at this stage.

New proposed flow

We presented our analysis to the client and his team. We laid out the breaks in the current flow and identified the severity of each one. We were able to convince the client of our proposal and the decision to focus our design on the first part of this process i.e. the initial client - customer communication.

Design direction

A series of binary questions will be posed to each user and the software would create a travel plan that has group consensus.

Designing for each micro interaction in the flow

Since this turned out to be more of a service as a product type of design, we decided to take it one interaction flow at a time. We first created low fidelity mockups for each step in the way and transformed them into implementeable high fidelity mockups while iteratively testing them.

1. Onboard and welcome the users

To make each group member feel welcomed and involved through te process, we wanted to capture the interests and constraints of the group members.

2. Capture the details required by the travel agent

We designed the following user interest survey to capture details that the travel agent needs from each group member.

How will we make sure that the needs are satisfied?

We deliberately ensured that we relate back to our interview findings at every step and align our design decisions with them.

Design decision 1

Keep it simple, small and easy to breeze through.

Design decision 2

Push people to converge on decisions

Xplor Website

Simplified communication between users and travel agents and improve user conversion rates.