Wizian - Whitelabel Travel Platform

Background

A whitelabel travel platform that helps users organise trips by booking theatre performances, attractions, hotels, and transport all in one place.

Team

4 designers, 1 researcher, FE/BE developers, project managers, business analysts, and content writers

Details

As Wizian was a whitelabel product, I worked on creating bespoke solutions for brands Virgin Trains, National Express, and lastminute.com. Working in an agile multidisciplinary team to roll out new initiatives in a 2 week sprint cycle.

Wizian's proposition was that customers could book a whole UK holiday for a great price rate. This bundle could include a theatre show, an attraction, a hotel, and transport. Customers would save time booking through this method and would also benefit from less post-checkout stress as there would be less companies involved.

There was a gap in the travel industry for such an offer so the outcome we were trying to reach in the design team was correctly communicating this proposition to prospective customers and converting them.

Process

Wizian was a white label product so partner websites had to be built on top of that framework, they shared a visual skeleton and many features. Part of my work involved looking at how the design flexes to our partner’s needs and working with the developers to see how we implement them.

The changes we made weren’t just from stakeholders requirements. We also continuously monitored the performance of the websites and I would take those findings to make iterations and optimise. For example, the National Express homepage has a shorter hero image to accommodate for the shorter screen size we were seeing used by customers (through Google Analytics).

As well as this I worked with our researcher to learn more about how customers use our service, this was done through customer interviews and guerrilla research. Through this we were able to make iterative changes to the language, imagery, and layouts for better performance.

Design system

As the number of partners grew, it was essential that our design system would scale. Doing this made sure the white label components would fit to each partner’s guidelines and as a result we had bespoke guidelines for each partner.

I helped create a component library for all designers to use. I arranged sessions with our front-end developers to make sure we were all pulling assets and components from the same library. This reduced UX debt on our side and tech debt and bugs on their side. It also enabled the team to have a closer relationship – which I consider highly important in a product team.

As part of this continuous project I also looked at the accessibility of the components. This includes colour contrast and screen-reader usage.

Chatbot

I led the initiative to implement a chatbot onto the platform. I initially worked with our product owner to look at outcomes we were trying to reach by implementing it – the initial one being another avenue to increase conversion with those cusomters who need more assistance. We did a storymapping session to slice the work and decide on our milestones, the initial one being a question and answer chatbot.

Knowing our requirements, I worked with our UX researcher to find where the best entry points would be. Then worked with the content team to create a tone of voice suited for a white label chatbot (since this would be offered to all our partners). Once the research was done, using a service design approach I created a comprehensive decision tree, outlining where the bot would surface and minimizing any dead ends in the journey as well as thinking about the back end systems that it would need to communicate with. The language and prompts would also change depending on where the customer is to best suit the situation.

To support this, I designed a visual style for the bot, to match the style of the platform and a mascot that would suit our current and future partners.