What have I been up to the past 16 years?
Let’s start with last year first:

Intro Update: Recently, I was selected to give some brief insights into what my team and I do within the larger Swiss travel group who’s celebrating their 90th anniversary. I lightly touch on the future of AI within Travel Products, what I think makes for great user experience, and my love for Italy with it’s many wonders.

Now back to the hi-level overview of my 2 years at Hotelplan Group as Team Lead:

Rakuten Pay app was the last of many Products that I created/maintained when working at Rakuten Advertising.

While working at Precision Medicine in Chicago, I designed and improved Products from several big name pharmaceutical companies such as Lilly.

Recent Accomplishments & Projects

  • Travel Group's UX Maturity Elevation

    Overall when joining the company, there was Limited UX Maturity. After I became the team lead, my team and I increased the level to User Driven UX Maturity in only 1 and a half years.

  • AI in Product Design

    With the many tools out there to help with menial tasks in Product Design, my team and I have identified where this helps and where the technology needs more time to advance. I’m always happy to talk about this over a call to walkthrough how we empowered our process.

  • Inntravel Detail Page Header Section

    Based on the UXR done months prior, the first implementation was a simple header section re-design that increased booking funnel entry by 60%!

  • Explore Interactive Map

    With all the places Explore tours go, how do you encapsulate that in a static itinerary? You don’t. You create an informational yet inspiring premium engagement feature.

  • Interhome Checkout Upgrade

    What’s more important than a checkout within an e-commerce platform? My team gave the checkout a major upgrade by simply making it easier to navigate such a crucial part of the customer journey.

  • Inntravel MVP Research

    A full platform re-design MVP of a walking tour company with an older customer base requires validation in the form of a 1 on 1 conversation with both existing base + our target demographic

What you’ll find below:

Innovation
AI-Powered User Research

Expansion
From UX Agency to In-House

Growth
Implementing Agile UX

Without any dedicated UX Researchers on the team, it was even more important for us to work smarter. Various research platforms have already implemented AI into their technology; however, after investigation we found that most were lacking. Therefore, we needed to be even more clever and use various platforms and strategies to cut down on the time needed for full research rounds. 

AI-Powered User Research

  • Discover: In my team, this usually starts with the data we see in Google Analytics and heat maps to then create a hypothesis that we would validate in our research round.

  • Define: After creating the hypothesis, we can then have AI build the framework of questions that would then easily transition to synthesising all of the important info & highlights. 

  • Deliver: All of this work then leads to the catalyst of how we present our findings to team members and key stakeholders. This is important so that we can align all teams on the direction of our Product to make the improvements needed to achieve our OKRs.

From UX Agency to In-House

Immediately after joining Hotelplan Group, I evaluated the UX Design procedures within the UK branch. It was clear that utilizing an in-house design team would be much more efficient, saving precious time and money.

Benefits of In-House Product Design team:

  • Build up people who have a closer connection to the Product and business

  • Unify and work towards business goals but also be an advocate for the user along their journey

  • Teach stakeholders of the symbiotic relationship of business to customer experience

Implementing Agile UX

In a decades-long established corporate organisation, it is not uncommon to find that good Product Design is often misunderstood or otherwise completely neglected. This was true in Hotelplan Group for both statements. Many of the Products (13 in total) were run by marketing or e-commerce teams and made direct requests to the engineering team. The graph to the left is a combination of proper Design Thinking combined with our modified Design Process that cuts down on wasted time and delivers tailor-made UX that achieves our core KPIs.

Here is what I did to begin to fix core issues:

  • Early Involvement: the Product Designers needed to be involved before a kick-off even occurred so that we assist in identifying core issues and create a hypothesis to then be validated

  • Avoid Spot Fixes: often times, stakeholders just want to make small fixes within the customer journey and not see the bigger picture in a way that Product Designers are trained

  • Prevent Backtracking: have Designers and Tech Leads become best friends. They need to check in with each other throughout the design process so that any idea/design sold to stakeholders is achievable and validated by research and through the tech stack

  • There are plenty more, of course: the rest of my solutions and findings can be elaborated on in a deeper conversation

Recent Case Studies

Most of my work in the last year has mainly been with Interhome. Interhome is a holiday home rental company that has existed for nearly 70 years. They have both B2C and B2B Products. Below are 2 case studies in which we applied Design Methodologies as well as our Design Process we use with Product Managers and stakeholders.

Client
Interhome B2C & B2B

Designers:
Alina Shypila, Attila Katona & Myself

Curious about more of my career?

16 years of Product Design can fill up a novel… The content above, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg.