Traveler Q&A
How might we answer traveler questions when they’re doing research for an upcoming trip
Background
The inspiration for Traveler Q&A came about when three teams worked together on a hackathon project with one basic goal: answer traveler questions. They built a simple feature allowing users to search content on a product page, then ask a question if they couldn’t find what they were looking for. The concept was well received by leadership, and the three teams pooled resources to make Traveler Q&A a reality.
User problem
Travelers researching a destination, property, or activity for an upcoming trip can’t easily find answers to all of their questions on Expedia. They turn to search engines, friends, family, blogs, call centers, and other travel sites ~140 times in the 45 days leading up to purchase to get additional information.
Opportunity
By creating a platform that connects travelers with experts who can provide trustworthy answers, we can reduce the effort travelers expend to research their trip, lead to high traveler engagement with Expedia partners, and build trust in Expedia as an online traveler agent.
Furthermore, seeing the types of questions travelers ask will help us identify gaps in our existing content.
My role
As the UX lead, I was responsible for discovery and design execution. I shared content strategy & UX copywriting responsibilities with a content strategist, and two additional designers helped with initial design explorations.
Skills used
Interaction design
User research
Content strategy
UX writing
Project management
Data analysis
Cat herding
Our process
Align on project goals
Ultimately we wanted to build a Q&A platform that could support all lines of business, across all of our brands. As part of the kick-off, we met with stakeholders from the three cross-organizational teams to align on the user problem and narrow down our scope for an MVP. As a group, we decided to build and test Q&A for properties first, with an eye towards scaling to other LOBs in the future. The team also opted to include the search functionality from the original hackathon project as part of the MVP.
Discovery
We started with a competitor analysis to help us understand how users expect to interact with a Q&A feature. We also put together a component audit to understand the jobs of each piece of content in a Q&A ecosystem. Creating basic user flows helped us define the capabilities & pages that needed to be built.
I use a lot of spreadsheets in the discovery phase. Here are screenshots from the Competitive Audit, Job of Components, and User Scenarios
Early flow diagrams helped us identify touchpoints for the user, the system, and the responder
Ideation and Design
In the discovery phase we identified two primary users: people asking questions, and people answering questions. We created scenarios for both use cases, and I sketched out ideas for how we could help each user accomplish their task. Once we’d narrowed down the design options, I built conceptual prototypes for each user flow and held design reviews with the product and engineering teams to capture their feedback.
After incorporating stakeholder feedback, we worked with a researcher to do two user studies: One to test the usability of our prototype, and another that helped us gain a deeper understanding of what users found most valuable in an answer.
Interactive prototype for user testing
Design, Build, and Launch
Once we incorporated feedback from our user studies and flushed out the designs, we were ready to build! We launched in 25 popular destinations across the US and Canada.
Iterate
For our MVP we relied on a group of Expedia employees to answer all of the traveler questions. We knew this wasn’t sustainable, but wanted to test the feature before involving our hotel partners and customers.
Once the test had been running for a couple of months, I analyzed the questions figure out who would provide the most credible answer. As of spring 2020, we are building out Q&A to allow answers from a larger traveler community.