On the Booking.com Flights team I was tasked with redesigning the Flights post-booking pages, with the goal of evolving it from an MVP to a final version.

Going into the project, the user needs were clear and well-defined by the user researcher on the team. There was also a product roadmap outlining upcoming plans to take into account. But most importantly, there was a company-wide commitment at the time to deliver a ‘connected trip’ experience to our customers.

Simply put, this meant design and development in a way that considered our entire ecosystem of products in order to provide an end-to-end travel experience.  

As a part of the ‘connected trip’ company roadmap, all of a user’s bookings (from all products) would be consolidated to one list instead of existing in each product separately.

This was an important factor to consider in designing the Flights experience. It was important to examine the post-booking pages in our other products since users would soon be navigating to them easily. Upon reviewing the other post-booking areas, I uncovered major inconsistencies that would pose a problem to our users, and to the company vision.

In summary, a user with multiple product bookings would be confronted with a very different user experience for each product. With each new booking, they’d have to use more effort than necessary to find information and perform similar actions. This type of fragmented experience was clearly at odds with the concept of a connected trip.

I put together a quick presentation and Figma prototype to highlight the problem. I shared it with our team’s product manager and user researchers to get their insights and gather more supporting evidence. Afterwards I approached the designers and product managers from the relevant teams, and eventually the wider design community, receiving valuable feedback every step of the way. The initiative was sponsored by our Head of Design and Director of Product as it would require design, product and tech involvement across several teams.

I recruited the help of few product designers and a user researcher familiar with the different post-booking areas, and we set out to draft a proposal for a way forward.

The project was greenlit with the support of our sponsors and respective product managers. Due to business priority, the scope was limited to desktop and mobile web platforms and excluded emails for the first iteration.

We started off by aligning on a simple user flow that would be suitable for all our products. Pre-alignment, each product had a different flow for booking confirmation and management, often times linking to multiple pages displaying duplicated information. A simple, standardized user flow was agreed upon.

From our user research, we understood that a post-booking user’s confidence and clarity about their booking status and information was most important. However the level of importance differed based on when and where the user would access this information. Our research also showed that the post-booking period presented a great opportunity to increase the discoverability of our other travel products. Hence, there was a business goal to use this opportunity wisely. We came up with a flexible content structure that would maximise the visibility of a machine-learning powered product recommendation widget, without compromising the user experience.

After the overall information architecture was laid out, the next step was to take a look at the elements that post-booking pages were composed of. We did an audit to identify similar information and functionality across our products that could be standardized or componentized.

We then defined and designed components and patterns to be used in the remainder of the design process. These were designed using the Booking.com Design system to ensure visual alignment with the rest of the Booking.com product and brand. Wherever possible, we reused or modified existing components.

We individually designed our respective post-booking pages using the agreed upon structure, components and patterns, while keeping product-specific requirements and appropriate information hierarchy in mind. After several rounds of group critique involving the wider design community, we settled on the first designs to be user tested.

Each designer was responsible for carrying out user testing of their design. For the Flights user test, I created a Figma prototype and a script along with scenarios to be tested on usertesting.com.

I ran two rounds of remote, unmoderated usability testing with several testers. I also ran tests with Customer service agents to ensure the design was addressing the most common issues our users were contacting us about.

All of the feedback was helpful in realizing some assumptions we made in our process, but the prototype of the new design was very well received overall. There were also a lot of Figma comments/ discussions involving product managers and developers along the way. Any feedback and insights gathered were considered for all products.

After three months of work, the design portion of the project was complete and the Flights post-booking pages were ready for implementation. The specs were handed over to the developers who had also started a tech alignment project in parallel.

What began as a task to redesign the Flights post-booking experience led to a comprehensive design project that influenced all Booking.com post-booking experiences, bringing them closer to the connected trip vision.

The Flights post-booking pages were the first to be implemented.  Of several shared components created, two went live with the release. The most notable impact of the project is that a full product team was funded to continue the effort, and to support the other post-booking teams in the transition to the aligned design vision we created. The ultimate objective of the proposal was realized within three months.

I did a handover to the designer and project manager of the new team, and I played a support role in the following months as they formed the team.