Redesigned a decades-old travel booking tool used by hundreds of companies across the world and secured a $1 billion contract with Flightcentre.
Flightcentre saw a 23% revenue boost after rollout.
The new tool was so easy to learn that our team completed the 2 year rollout plan 6 months ahead of time and Flightcentre did not report any productivity loss.
Applied behavioral science to influence sales reps leading to an 8.7% increase in Total Transaction Value (TTV) amounting to over $800M
The blue screen
This is what Sabre Red Workspace looked like when the project started: a blue screen text-input only interface that required agents to spend weeks learning complex commands and keyboard shortcuts to be proficient, and many months to develop mastery.
The ask
Flightcentre, an international travel agency, typically hires agents seasonally, and many of them have no experience with the travel industry or its tools. They needed a travel booking tool that new agents could learn quickly and that would highlight more profitable options to increase each transaction’s value. But we had to balance those goals against the needs of existing users that preferred the speed and power the command line approach provided.
The Process
To determine the best approach we spent weeks discussing existing problems, gaps, and opportunities with stakeholders and users, gleaning insights through interviews and observation of their work flows. We brainstormed solutions to the most impactful issues we identified and rapidly developed a product vision, creating videos that showed how the tool would look and work to get buy-in from stakeholders.
Once we aligned on the vision we split the features out so individual designers could tackle them in parallel. Each feature required discussions with partners, working sessions, design and testing, and the team met daily to provide feedback and make sure design patterns were aligned across the experiences.
The ResultS
We settled on a hybrid platform that would be the best of both worlds. Users could type commands and work in an updated, but familiar, traditional interface, or move to a fully hybrid graphical version. We lifted some of the best ideas from online consumer booking tools and added them to the graphical version so using the tool felt familiar to new agents, just like using Expedia or Travelocity.
The hotel Code
Though I worked on all aspects of the platform, my focus was Hotel bookings. This area had been neglected for years, even though it provided the best profit margin and was seeing the greatest growth across the industry. Along with discussions with our hotel experts, I dug deep into how the hotel booking system worked, including combing through XML’s to understand data structures, to determine what was technically possible for the redesign.
Follow The Data
Leveraged analytics to better understand what commands users were typing when booking hotels and how often. This, and additional user research, guided our information hierarchy, keeping the interface as clean as possible while providing key details and actions at a glance.
Workshop it!
I planned and ran workshops with agents to better understand what features were missing and where we could make improvements with the biggest impact for the initial product release. One such activity was “Buy a Feature”, conducted at an industry conference with dozens of agents, to help inform the information hierarchy.
I also helped plan and run workshops with industry SME’s and airline and hotel executives to align on product features and enhancements.
We nailed it
I’m proud to say we delivered version 1.0 of the product in time to win the $1B contract. Seasoned and new agents alike were very pleased with the updated tool, confirming we had successfully walked the line between the two primary user types. The product was delivered to Flightcentre and rolled out to other agencies, with a robust line of communication between us so feedback could be incorporated quickly.
Flightcentre reported a 23% jump in revenue after they completed the rollout, and no loss of productivity during that time.
Total Transactions Value jumped 8.7% in the first year, an $800M+ gain.
The new tool was so easy to learn that all 9,500 Flightcentre agents were upgraded to it with 6 months to spare on the rollout timeline.