EVAN SOARES
EGENCIA USER RESEARCH
A narrow glimpse into the process and output of a research project conducted in 2018 for Egencia Llc., Expedia Group's managed business travel arm.
Project goal: to gain a nuanced understanding of a little-understood user segment, the Travel Arranger (users that book flights, hotels, rental cars, and other products on behalf of travelers other than themselves). This research, coupled with a quantitative analysis derived from accounting metrics and site analytics was used to create a series of artifacts - primarily a user persona and interactive journey map - used to disseminate findings to Egencia company-wide.
Role: UX design, visual design. Research undertakings shared 50% with one other Senior Product Designer.
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Expedia Group is the world's second-largest travel booking platform. Its users are primarily self-bookers shopping for leisure travel products. Thus, business travel arrangers do not fall within the regular scope of research and user profiling and their specific needs are largely unknown and potentially unaddressed. In order to gain a deeper understanding of said needs, I, along with one colleague, began with a loose proto-persona based on past research and established assumptions. The first step in bolstering this persona was to answer basic questions about the Travel Arranger (TA) subtype such as "what percentage of the user base is comprised of TA's?" "How frequently do they access Egencia?" and "What is the TA subtype's percentage contribution to monthly gross booking volume?"
The above quantitative analysis was supported by a Qualtrix survey followed by a series of in-situ interviews. 12 interviews, about an hour each were conducted with Travel Arrangers during which they were asked to make an Egencia booking in real time while Product Designers observed their behaviors and asked a standardized set of questions meant to establish sentiment throughout the booking process. Individual answers were normalized during post-interview analysis until commonalities emerged. In this way, obvious pain points, moments of delight, and commonly held opinions were identified.
In order to share these findings with colleagues across disciplines including Design, Product, Data Science, and Marketing, the research was codified as a user journey map hybridized with a basic user persona. Below is an early exploration of the map's structure.
I found that a robust presentation of my findings could not be distilled into a static document such as a single image and that a multi-page document such as a .pdf was not satisfactory. In order to create a single document containing the full breadth and depth of the study's results, I decided on an interactive map that discloses information progressively through a matrix of hover states, external links, and prominent links to answer four of my audience's most frequently asked questions.
The site itself cannot be shared publicly as it contains more information than can be easily redacted and links to Egencia's private intranet. Below are several views of the map overlayed with information hover states and indications of some of the map's many interactive elements. The Egencia Travel Arranger Interactive Journey Map continues to be used as a reference for the company's UX designers and has set a very high standard for research and data presentation.
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