Expedia first responder
How can we help those affected by natural disasters?
Our go live flow.
My role
I was the sole UX designer handling all things design and research. I worked with 3 backend devs, 1 front end dev, and 1 product owner.
Skills Used
user interviews
interaction design
visual design
information architecture
Background
In 2017 Expedia was gearing up to have our 6th global 72 hour hackathon. The theme was “helping people go places”. It also happened to be the middle of hurricane season. A few coworkers and I were interested in teaming up and wanted to do something to help evacuees. While we knew that natural disasters are unstoppable, they impact 160 million people every year. and we felt that, do something to help people find a safe place to stay when it happens.
User problem
According to user interviews I conducted, people commonly feel fearful, worried, and overwhelmed when evacuating their home due to a natural disaster. When evacuees are looking for lodging, their top criteria are pet-friendly properties, kitchen availability, parking, and FEMA-reimbursement. (FEMA stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency and essentially provides eligible citizens with housing reimbursement.)
Business opportunity
While the FEMA website provides a list of Evacuee Hotel names and addresses, it has several limitations in displaying the top evacuees' criteria and is not an optimal shopping experience.
Expedia, on the other hand, has all the required information to provide a concise set of property choices based on the evacuees' criteria. By being at the forefront, we can increase our Net Promoter Score and overall Traveler Loyalty, truly helping travelers when they need it most.
our process
Interview evacuees
Define critical property criteria for evacuees
Understand what existing tech we could use
Create end-to-end flows and supporting designs
Iterate on designs and build simultaneously
Win the global hackathon :)
Socialize with global call center team
intial flow ideas
Early explorations when we were still figuring out what we were going to build.
hotel search results variations
There were so many…
A few variants of the new hotel cards.
A few more variants of the hotel cards.
Finally, the last round of variations. We ended up using the variants on the far right.
Final product
We took place in the hackathon, beating over 300 teams globally. Judging criteria was based on how close the product was to production, how big of a traveler problem we addressed, and how sizable the business opportunity was.
Our “super landing page” that could support multiple events happening at once.
Afterwards
After we won the hackathon, we socialized our product across the organization including the global call center operations team and the natural disasters team. Everyone loved the product and had different ideas for how it could be used. We worked with the natural disaster team to break down the product into parts that could be built over time. Currently, the internal dashboard is being used to trigger the travel alert on expedia.com today, which reduced the number of steps from 14 to 1. Other aspects of the product are on their backlog.