Travel Inspiration
Photo by Derek Thomson, via Unsplash
Research and design “Travel Inspiration,” a new feature on United.com’s homepage that would allow customers to browse nearly 200 destinations and receive personalized travel recommendations.
Researched & designed the new “Travel Inspiration” content hub from early project conception to final MVP build
Collaborated with org leadership and stakeholders
Managed partnership with AFAR, a boutique travel magazine, to create custom, original content for the product, including over 1,500 images and copy blurbs
Created visual design and micro-interactions
Documented design and managed the front-end build of new, responsive and custom web components
In 2017, United’s public perception nosedived when Dr. David Dao was forcibly removed from a United flight. What followed was a company-wide effort to rehabilitate the brand image and better engage with customers. On the digital front, this began with a homepage redesign and replatforming.
Our goals were to rethink this touchpoint so that it was contemporary, responsive, and friendly. We refreshed copy with a more conversational voice, for example, but United sought even more ways to renew customer excitement surrounding travel.
Stakeholders pushed for the implementation of a “Travel Inspiration” feature, which they envisioned as an entry point into an inspirational content hub. In theory, “Travel Inspiration” users could jump start their search for their next vacation destination by exploring United’s growing list of destinations, potential accommodations, flight pricing, and attraction information, all without leaving our website.
Before proposing a design, I wanted to better understand how customers are currently researching and planning their trips:
What process do customers currently use to research and ultimately choose a leisure travel destination?
What factors do customers take into consideration during the decision-making process?
What is the timeline for their travel-related decisions?
How would a new United travel inspiration experience fit into the customer journey prior to booking a flight?
To gain insight, I oversaw a few discovery activities.
A competitive analysis, wherein we looked at the content and decision-making tools that already existed on travel search engines, competitor airlines, and travel magazines
Market research lit reviews
Customer interviews, wherein we spoke with ten customers, each recently returned from a leisure vacation, about how they had decided where they wanted to travel and what kind of online research they’d done in advance of their trip
A journey mapping exercise with stakeholders to understand how this product could fit into the customer’s process of choosing a destination and booking a flight.
The discovery phase confirmed a few of my assumptions and influenced the strategies I proposed to product leadership.
Customers don’t expect to find content that would help them research potential destinations on an airline’s website.
Develop a communication and awareness campaign and strategy
Create new avenues for discovery; SEO, Google AdWords, and grow other entry points through United digital ecosystem beyond the United.com homepage.
Customers do not make travel decisions or book flights impulsively. They usually seek advice from multiple sources, making their final travel-related decisions over a month after they first begin to research potential destinations.
Build a retargeting campaign through email and social media to encourage customer to return and book after destination decision is made.
Include the ability to favorite destinations and save to their MileagePlus account
Customers’ initial research into new destinations is highly exploratory. A single display of “Personalized Destination Recommendations” would not be enough to influence their travel decisions.
Build out Pinterest-like “category pages” to encourage destination discovery based on personal interests in activities
Based on my research, I thought it was risky to go all in on the “Travel Inspiration” right away. So, I advocated for an MVP that greatly reduced the scope. I proposed we start with adding static destination tiles on the homepage linking to basic content pages, encouraging customers to explore a few beach destinations. That way, we could see if users engaged with the feature before we built a personalization engine, an API into a new CMS, and signed a pricey contract with a content provider.
Ultimately, though, stakeholders didn’t mind the risks associated with the new product. They wanted a large-scale first release, which would give customers the ability to explore 150 destinations, of all types, right off the bat. They agreed that there should be at least seven blog post-like articles about each destination. In other words, they wanted to go all out.
While it was frustrating to have my product strategies dismissed, I put together two design concepts based on stakeholder vision. They chose to move forward with a concept that they believed best balanced destination exploration and funneling users into a booking flow, and we went all in on preparing the product for a 2018 release.
I worked closely with our content provider, AFAR – Travel Magazine and Guide, to strategize the content and information architecture of the “Travel Inspiration” feature. Our priority was to organize our hundreds of pages of content in a way that made sense to leisure travelers.
Based on trends that emerged during a card-sorting activity with 50 customers, we settled on categorizing destinations with the following tags:
Subcategories allowed us to get more specific in our tags and content for each destination. For example, under Outdoors, a customer could focus their search based on destinations known for skiing & snowboarding, parks & gardens, kayaking & rafting, wildlife, hiking, golf, natural attractions, or national parks.
Each destination displayed content related to, on average, seven subcategories. Santiago, Chile, for example, was tagged with wine & wineries, horseback riding, national parks, natural attractions, parks & gardens, ski & snowboarding, and street markets.
When we were happy with the organization, I created the visual design, and AFAR filled in my templates with custom copy and images for each destination. A final round of usability testing helped us strengthen our copy and validate the navigation and interaction patterns for desktop and mobile views.
The Travel Inspiration feature launched on June 12, 2019. The company first reviewed the analytics in September of that year, just over three months after launch. No promotions or communications messaging had yet gone out.
Here are some highlights:
In the first 3.5 months (June 12-September 21), 106,000 independent sessions had been initiated using “Travel Inspiration,” 48.9% of which led to a flight search.
In the four-week period ending September 21, MileagePlus members made 2,192 bookings for a destination they had seen in Travel Inspiration in the previous 30 days.
Flight bookings through “Travel Inspiration” increased every single week since launch.
Approximately 8% of “Travel Inspiration” sessions had been from repeat visitors.
Here are some screen recordings of transition and micro-interaction designs that we didn't have time to implement.