Conversational Shopping

We knew from past research data synthesis, several in-home contextual inquiries with trip planners, that we identified a gap in our product's ability to allow travelers to explore freely and plan before shopping. Travelers who took on the responsibility as the "trip planner" often had to resort to using other methods such as competitors and Google search. Recent data unfortunately showed this trend continued. We needed a simple way to capture and understand traveler intent in an intuitive way, delivering a more personalized, tailored experience. This would be a potential way to build a stronger relationship with our customers by engaging with them at the very top of the "funnel" before they may even know their destination or other details needed to shop.

Our hypothesis was that the very open nature of conversational experiences like chat could provide a way to provide these unmet needs for travel planners everywhere.

Research and Discovery Phase

• Synthesized data from past in-home contextual inquiries
• Used the past data to form clearly articulated traveler problem statements and unmet needs
• Developed several hypothetical concepts for each problem statement and unmet need
• Performed several iterative research phases
• Used Google Venture's design sprint as a jumping off point to develop a new method for remote participants and a fully distributed team

In conclusion of the research and discover phase, we learned that conversational experiences capture and understand traveler intent in an intuitive way, delivering a more personalized, tailored experience. This is a potential way to build a stronger relationship with our customers and deliver better to their needs.

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Iterative Design Build Phase

• We used highly modified design sprints that followed a cycle of concept development, research, and build
• Using the iterations we providing new data and design decisions to our engineers about every 3 weeks
• We used this work to determine and finalize the core requirements

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Beta Testing And Live iOS Release

• We pushed towards a baseline core experience, imperfect without all use cases or edge, that was a fully functioning iOS Beta
• Used research participants and internal users to provide feedback from our Beta
• Used the final iterations to integrate and guide other launch teams
• Were ready for launch before any other team with all core functionality

• We gained new data about travelers that would inform future work both within conversational experiences and beyond such as search.
• From our iterative design build cycles we developed several working prototypes that enabled us to both test and develop design patterns for the future.
• At Expedia Group's annual Explore conference in Las Vegas, we were featured as one of the key themes and the experience was presented in the main hall to the entire conference.
• The full experience including voice input was launched in the iOS app during the conference.