Background#
As one of the key players in worldwide travel experiences, TUI is well known for their overall vacation experiences and customer care services excellence.
With a vast imperium of cruise boat offers, flights and resorts, they have managed to grow along decades into a worldwide scale of vacation providers scattered across all continents.
The overall TUI vacation experience comprises of a well thought out and seamless holiday plan for bookings, tending from young couples, to retired ones, while also including specialized family vacation packages that are sure to let everyone make the best out of their break time.
The company is constantly investing into making their value towards a more unified digital experience, breaking apart from agency-only standards and website solutions, while keeping an eye on the personalised catered packages that drove their growth and recurring customer base to the exponential reference they find themselves to be today.
Project status and roadmap#
While working with COCUS in Portugal, I was presented with the opportunity to join the TUI Mobility Hub team in the UK, helping to influence and rebuild parts of their current mobile app, catering for a user base of thousands of customers across different markets.
Working tandem with the U.K. product and design team was a fantastically challenging experience as well as a satisfying one.
Everyone was profoundly focused on bringing their “A-game” into play, always pitching new concepts and product development ideas to enhance the experience while focusing on driving sales to a boost.
The main goal was to rebuild a better digital experience, appealing for the brand’s traditional customers while also capturing a new generation of travellers accustomed to other digital solutions and different vacation models.
Research and Design process#
Working as part of a highly-skilled design team across 2 different countries, meant we had to be meticulous with our creative process and ensure there was always an involvement of all parts on each design initiative.
We were building each iteration of the product side-by-side with the team’s Product Owners, and advocating for each idea and change proposal as a collective product team. This meant the pace of new initiatives rollout was slower at times, but ensured that the overall experience coming to market was repeatedly trialed and tested through multiple iterations ahead of its public release.
This workflow would also allow us to test multiple versions of each design, which could work best for each different market, while keeping them well documented and updated for future iterations.
During this time of work on the mobile app, one of the main pain points we always were confronted with was having to deal with the inconsistency of some user flows, result of poorly documented and rushed previous work, and the legacy of a web-based interface which didn’t had in consideration mobile-first best practices for users’ experience.
Our approach to address these without causing any inconvenience to our live-users was to attempt rebuilding each section as an independent block/zone, that we could then work upon and release to public in a phased manner, keeping the navigation and journeys consistent across all redesigned areas, and gradually cleaning up old parts of the app and discontinuing outdated features.
Conceptual hypothesis#
One interesting team dynamic that was a frequent practice were meet-ups and hackathons.
From time to time we would gather all the Product Team and Market Owners for 1-2 days of debate, hang-out, and do some exploratory / experimental work on some product ideas, that would drive innovation forward on our already established product.
Most of these ideas would not become production ready until much later on, and some of them wouldn’t even see the light of day. But the main goal here was to try to get us working as a team, and developing new interesting concepts, exploring new pathways for user interaction, and overall re-imagine new forms to provide a better app usage for our users.
Changes implemented and Future iterations#
For the whole duration of my collaboration with the TUI Mobility Hub team I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity of work with some very talented individuals, and to have some of my work being released publicly to our users. This gave me a sense of satisfaction, humility and real contribution to the team, as much as it was always a scary process given how large our usage numbers were.
Crafting a personalized experience for vacation goers while taking in consideration a multiplicity of markets, each with their own customizations and seemingly unique business logic has proved many times to be a challenge that needed to fit within the same app.
Nevertheless, with the help of all market responsibles and a focused Product Team, I can clearly state it was a gratifying learning experience, that still holds a place of pride in my career path to this day.
The ability to help improving people’s holidays, being a helpful hand instead of a bottleneck or painful experience, while attempting to resolve their real world issues at a distance, was a gratifying feeling that I now tend to appreciate and carry with me while on my personal vacation plans.
