Amadeus’s goal was to self-service a regulated and scalable network which would not bottleneck access for 40,000 customers globally.
Another goal was modernizing the Mass Market travel agency portal and enhancing the speed of onboarding new products.
Create a portal to enable seamless commercial ordering, billing, user management, training, and support, while following Amadeus’
digital transformation and multi-market joint-venture strategy.
The main challenge: rapid alignment and resolution of user pain points, goals, and core UX elements for quick development among scattered cross-regional stakeholders.
Amadeus - Design Sprint
Overview
Portal redesign to improve self-service functionalities for mass-market travel agencies.
Role
UX Team Lead & Sprint Facilitator Oversaw the design sprint aimed
at the next version of Amadeus’ B2B Travel e-commerce Portal.
I was the lead facilitator for the alignment of international stakeholder,
providing a validated UX framework for expedited prototyping and user testing.
The team gathered designers, product leaders and cross-disciplines
stakeholders from Amadeus.
Timeline
2016 - 3 days sprint
Goal & challenge
What I did
- Developed the sprint activities and schedules. I also created the groups with participants beforehand as well as the workshop plans for each day.
- Made sure we would have targeted outcomes from open sessions, for proactive parallel verification of the problems, research, and ideation.
- Guided the UX team over the sprint on the discussions to synthesize insights on the user of focus.
- Engaged with the senior stakeholders on the business and technical resolutions and the scope of the alignment.
- Moderate design activities towards the advocacy of strategic outcomes to operate as a player-coach.
Process & approach
Discovery & Research
- Listening to customers and working through primary reports served as the groundwork and foundation.
- The team was aligned for better interaction and collaboration during the work due to the shared user personas and future vision documents.
A travel agent persona
Part 1 of a travel agent workflow
Strategy Definition
- Helped shift the focus to “How Might We” questions and introduced a series of quick ideas with lightning demos to solve for the design challenges.
- The major pain points and future opportunities for mass market travel agencies were easily highlighted and prioritized.
0.5, 5 and 10 years goals - "AI" in 10 years sounds quite right in 2025.
Rough product journey for an EMEA persona.
Clustered How Might We...? with votes
Clustered keypoints from Lightning Demos
Design Definition
- Developed a set of core principles to emphasize the importance of user journey simplification while guaranteeing language and device accessibility.
- Developed a content strategy, along with a shared definition of the information architecture.
Some key points from the "Community" cluster
A 14 steps storyboard for a travel agent journey
Execution
- We delivered a product vision and a set of structured wireframes for rapid validation, capturing an end-user purchase journey with proposed changes for intermediate users.
Crazy 8 sketching
Wireframe for this Amadeus Mass Market product
Outcome & KPIs
- Within 3 days, reached alignment on user pain points and long term targets which helped to gain more momentum for the project.
- Provided key wireframes and template structures which helped to quickly pivot to detailed UI design and user testing.
- Helped to obtain faster buy-in from the Amadeus sponsors and stakeholders which reduced the slow delays typically associated with multi-stakeholder project validation.
Credits
- Amadeus collaborators from different countries (Distribution Product Management, Design, Distribution Marketing, NECSE Region, Distribution Marketing).
- Bakelite colleagues who helped with the facilitation and with the sprint synthesis.