Family Travelers | Portfolio

Agoda Family

A case study in redefining the way new features are imagined and tested at Agoda

Team design effort with Chutimon (Pang) Tangtanaporn

My role

Challenges

Design lead, manager, for Family Traveler Segments at Agoda. Pang was a designer on my team responsible for visual design and concept iteration
Driver of process, advocating for and negotiating with the product team for a two week family-focus design sprint, facilitator of design exploration and feedback sessions

Heavy skepticism and resistance from product team
As part of negotiation we still had to deliver on our regular family stories on top of this work
Our AB testing platform did not favor these types of experiments

Why is this project important?

1.

Prove that design deserves a seat at the product table

At Agoda virtually all new feature ideas came from the product owner in the form of stories.

There were no processes in place for collaborative quarterly brainstorming sessions, strategic design.. the norm was for designers to be assigned stories and execute.

Learn more about how I worked to increase the role of design at Agoda

2.

Enable us to tackle larger feature ideas

Because we historically designed and tested incrementally with AB testing, each story was small.

Because design was often not part of the planning process, there was no guarantee that the work would be cohesive, and therefor no space to flex our UX muscles by fleshing out ideas as part of a larger picture.

3.

Change the way we measure success

Our AB testing platform encourages POs to set up 'clean' individual tests for clear results.

This results in incredibly slow product change, and the discarding of potentially good ideas that simply failed in the broader context of the product at the moment of testing.

Agoda

I hypothesized that these small iterations were not prominent enough to build trust and change our family booker's behaviors.

By engaging in a strategic design sprint we would have a collection of 'themed' features to test - and that would increase bookings.

How and what I advocated for

My working document shows my planning and proposal for how we'd make this a success.

I went back and forth with Subhanshu (product owner for Family) and Kevin (product head of Segments) to advocate for this time and explain why it was important. They reluctantly agreed, and we still had to deliver the normal stories on top of this work.

By our first check-in, midway through week 1, Subhanshu was thrilled with what we had come up with and was 100% bought in to the process.

The success generated excitement among the product owners, especially the others in Segments, and resulted in increased collaboration between product and my design teams.

Many of the stories that resulted from this work were deemed a statistical success, and increased family bookings.

Pang's design work shows the breadth of concept explorations and how they work together as a cohesive theme.

As soon as a site visitor changes their occupancy to anything greater than 2 adults they are considered a family (baby, kids or teens, or group). The goal is to help them find appropriate multi-room type bookings or family suites, and highlight properties that have the right services (children under 12 stay free, playground, etc)

Each design component is mix and match in terms of experimentation and implementation, but have been designed holistically.