"¿A dónde vamos?"
Creating a product from scratch

THE TEAM

1 UX Lead: Emilia Ronchetti

1 UX Designer
1 UX Researcher
1 UX Writer

Problem

Despegar's value proposition was very easy to match, they lacked a differentiation strategy

In 2018 the Company Despegar realized that their brand positioning at the time "best price guaranteed", was something that the competition could and was easily matching.

Even though the company was leading the market in South America, in the last 5 years, they were losing market share and therefore needed to develop a differentiation strategy to stay top of mind.

Opportunity

The opportunity that the company discovered was to develop a differentiation strategy centered in the stage of the customer journey the company had yet to tackle: Inspiration & Assessment.

- Company needs: To gain more market share and remain top of mind
- User needs: to find new destinations to travel to and understand what were the pros and cons of each destination. Some user questions were: Is the destination kid friendly? Will I be able to shop at the destination?

We analyzed our current products and realized that the company didn't have any strategies to attack these user needs. That is when we as a company decided to develop a product that would satisfy those necessities.

I led the UX team and guided the research so we could understand the user's organic behavioral patterns regarding how they would find inspiration and assessment for their next trip. That was what we needed to understand in order to crate a product that satisfied those needs.

Process

Research

The research plan was made up of 3 distinct phases:

First approach
User interviews and debriefing
Workshop creation

The research was done focusing on the Brazilian market. Despegar provides travel services for all Latin America, but since the UX team was mostly stationed in Argentina we decided that it was best to center our research in the Brazilian market because it most foreign to the UX teams knowledge and because it was a very important market for the company.

Research Segmentation:

With the team we developed a script that had the following questions:

What inspired you to choose that travel destination? Where did you receive your inspiration from? How did you start to plan your last trip? Did you have a budget before you started to plan? How important was your travel companion? Were the dates of the trip a non negotiable? What type of attractions did you want to experience at the destination?

The output of this research was a timeline that showcased the pattern of decision making the users applied when planning their next trip. We designed the timeline and shared it with our team and stakeholders during the ideation workshop.

Ideation

The workshop consisted of two different stages:

Stage 1> Lightning talks: 30 minutes

Stage 2> Idea prototyping: 3 hours

The objective of the lightining talks was to present the results of the research done by my team, as well as all other insights gathered by members of Product Management, Marketing, Market Research and SEO. For example people presented: company performance metrics, marketing campaigns metrics, organic search trends, etc. The participants had to actively listing to all the information and take notes so that they could later use that information in the ideation stage of the workshop.

The objective of the ideation stage was to develop one or more ideas that we could implement.

Individual brainstorming (30 minutes)
Group divided into teams of 3. Each shared their ideas and the team voted for the one with the most potential. The team continued developing that idea, and developed an elevator pitch for it (1 hour)
Each team presented their idea (30 minutes)
Each member of the group had 2 votes to vote for the best idea (30 minutes)
One idea was named the winner

The most voted idea was:

To develop a chatbot that would ask the user questions in order to recommend the best destination. The questions were based on the users travel companion,s dates, landscapes and experiences.

The solution

MVP

We built a product that had the following sections:

On-boarding: Here we explained to the user what was the product did and how he could use it.

Chatbot: Here the objetive was to develop a delightful interaction for the user that would allow us to gather data about what he was looking for, in order to recommend a destination

Results: We grouped results according to geography because we knew that that way of displaying data (travel destinations) was familiar for the user. Also, the research revealed that the distance between home and the travel destination is something very important when deciding where to travel.

Destination landing page: Here we gave the user all the information about the destination so that he could get to know the destination in depth and get inspired by it.

Usability Testing

Out of all the sections we considered that it was necessary to test the chatbot. This was because we didn't have any experience designing chatbots, but we did have experience and many metrics to justify our design decisions for results pages and landing pages.

What did we test?

The understanding and fluidity of use
Setting the dates
Relation between wordings and images
Amount of experiences they tapped
Amount of distribution the tapped

Dates

11 of 13 usuarios: Did not understand the idea of the dates in chatbot
9 of 13 users Tapped the emojis

6 of 13 users: Understood the difference between the wordings: amount of days and specific date

9 de 13 users: Had difficulties swiping

Landscapes

All the users: Understood the interactions
All the users: Tapped more than one option
They would add the option “Fields”
They thought of experiences like landscapes…
*It was satisfactory to see the experiences*

Experiences

All the users: Understood the interaction

Before choosing, the user imagined how they were going to live out those experiences with their travel patterns.

11 of 13 users: Did not understand the experience tours y excursiones→ Paseos

Passengers

All the users: Understood the interaction
All the users: Tapped more than one option

7 of 13 users: Suggested that the distributions should be placed before landscapes and experiences since their travel companion determines the type of trip.

Final product

Results

The success was determined by the following metrics:

Time on page
How many users successfully finished all steps of the product
Amount of new users (leads) the product creates

This was the first product at the company whose success was not determined by the sales, meaning GB.

The product had and still has the challenge of competing against its own metrics. With each iteration trying to improve the 3 metrics mentioned, the real success of this product will be achived once it is positioned in the users mind as the go to guide for finding their next travel destination.

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"¿A dónde vamos?" Creating a product from scratch