Challenges of a responsive booking flow

The necessity to think about our way of working

For cust-omers & business alike

Airberlin decided in late 2014 to switch to a new “internet booking engine” in short “IBE”. We knew from previous experience that every system at least needs to be reviewed and adjusted so it can fit into the new IBE. But we saw more. We saw an opportunity not just to adapt our platform but to reshape it with the customer and business in mind. This is where our exciting journey began. A mission to tear down walls between departments, one that was driven by goal-oriented and user-centric approaches. All with the goal in mind to elevate the user experience and usability to a new level for airberlin. But besides our enthusiasm, we knew that it would take time and persuasion to get everyone with us on board.

Understand, observe and define

Understanding the project will stretch over the next 1,5 years, we choose an iterative approach, to be able to react to possible changes. Together with the business owner, we divided the new IBE into unique parts to reduce interference of modifications, based on our knowledge of our current IBE. The design team took a big part of what is usually a part of product ownership. We investigated each of the features and looked at its data and metrics. This way, we understood what both the business and the user needed equally and used these insights to create a flexible structure.

Ideate and prototype

Using the insights from the feature analysis, we ideated possible solutions on a regular base with the product managers and developers. This constant exchange gave us new perspectives and made us aware of certain restrictions. Our baseline of communication were whiteboards, static designs as also interactive prototypes that could show what is difficult to express in words. Through reshaping features instead of adding new ones, we were able to build a product that served the needs of the user and the business. Throughout the whole project, verifying the solutions was always an essential part of the work the design team provided.

Validate and learn

The prototypes we build became the tool to separate facts from opinions by testing them with our users. We continuously tested single features with real users to discover where we still lacked expectations — using surveys, interviews and user testing sessions. As the context is essential, we repeated the testing later on again together with other features and the full flow, to verify our results.

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Test participants

months of continuous testing

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Tests & surveys

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Acceptance rate of new design

My role and learnings

This project provided me with my most significant learning curve while having a leading role at airberlin. I was growing together with the project. I was taking on the responsibility for delivering design infrastructure, be a partner to the business owner and building the team. I mastered how to keep up with the roadmap, how to consider business and user needs equally, and how to win others for our idea. The key to achieving this was, reorganising the design teams into sprints, beeing KPI and data-driven and by communicating continuously and openly with everyone involved. We started to create an environment where ideas were thriving, and trust in each others abilities grew.