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Actionable Messages for Travelers

How we worked through the problem of discovering if the information we were showing to travelers was valuable or not, and the most effective way to deliver that information.

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Background

Emburse Go is a traveler companion app for business travelers at enterprise organizations that promises to...

  • Enable contextual communication to keep employees informed, safe, and supported 

  • Integrate all travel suppliers into one single platform to make it easier for employees to get all information in one place

Problem

A key value proposition in our traveler companion app was “Actionables,” messages with useful information that pop up in the user’s timeline and give them options to take further actions based on their needs as a traveler.

On average, action was taken on the messages only 10% of the time they were shown.

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Objective

Research was needed to inform product strategy and changes to ultimately increase conversion on actionable messages.

My objective was to uncover why the rate was low and provide recommendations to be implemented to increase the rate of utilizing actionable messages.

Role

I was the sole and lead researcher for this project, helping shape research questions, developing the research approach and script, recruiting participants, and owning synthesis.

My collaborators included:

  • The head designer for the Emburse Go app

  • The product manager for Emburse Go

I included collaborators in the project during...

 

  • Kickoff and Research Question Development

  • Plan Review

  • Open-door interview policy

  • Findings presentation and follow-up ideation

Timeline

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Research Questions

  1. Define “important” messages for travelers (what does “important” mean to them?)

  2. Discover user behaviors and preferences on how users receive information about their trips currently

  3. Identify any pain points with the existing actionables experience

The requesting team initially wanted to go with pure usability testing of the original experience to identify issues, but I recommended the addition of the first question to truly understand what travelers considered to be important, as this would also play into what messages they took action on.

Methods

Interview

 

​Focusing on current experience of gathering information, pain points, and preferences.

Usability testing and think-aloud impression testing of existing experience

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Setting the stage for the beginning of the travel experience and for the end of the travel experience.

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Recruitment

​All Emburse Go users work at enterprise-sized organizations.

 

The vast majority of Emburse Go users take between (1-12 trips per year). Extremely frequent travelers typically use their own favorite apps or systems.

 

10 total participants recruited via UserTesting with a screener I created.

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  • People who had taken at least one business trip in the last 6 months (to get recent experience)

  • People who had taken between 1 and 12 trips in the past year total

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Interview Portion

We grounded the interview questions in past travel experiences to understand their actual behaviors and used TEDW phrasing to draw out detailed responses.

 

  1. Tell me about the last time you went on a trip for work. Where were you going and what was the purpose of your trip?

  2. Tell me about your priorities when you travel for work. What’s important to you?

  3. What are you typically doing to prepare when you have a business trip coming up within the next week?

  4. On the day of your travel, walk me through how you received information about your trip?

  5. Explain what information was easy to find? What was hard to find?

  6. What messages do you typically ignore about your trip? Why?

  7. What messages do you typically always open?

Usability Tasks

  1. Imagine now that your flight is today. Tell us the most important information you would need and then gather it with the app.

  2. Find information on how to get to your hotel after the flight with the app.

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Some usability tasks were more open-ended to see how they browsed through the app. Others were scoped down.

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Analysis & Synthesis

​Interview - I made an affinity map to track answers to the interview question and identify themes in how travelers gathered information currently and what information they found most important.

 

Usability Tasks - I created video clips of travelers completing each task and tracked their paths, to identify where they expected to complete the workflow.

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Deliverables

I created a slide deck to walk stakeholders through the findings on each question in-depth. I addressed Goals 1 and 2 in the first half of the deck to explain the traveler’s mindset BEFORE showing usability findings, as this provided important context for their paths within the app. I heavily used video clips to demonstrate the indirect paths users went through to complete the tasks and build empathy with users struggling.​

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Findings

I finished my findings presentation with a list of problems, HMW questions to inspire further brainstorming on how to address the problems, and my own recommendations of potential solutions based on the research.

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Testing Again

Iterations

The designer then spent a week to iterate on the design to...

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  1. Address lack of urgency by highlighting the urgent ones in deep magenta and expanding them

  2. Address the lack of clarity by reducing copy to keywords in actionable

  3. Address disjointed appearance by nesting less urgent actionables within their subject section

Second Round Testing

We tested the new designs with a smaller group (n=5), leveraging the same screener survey and the same key tasks from the script.

 

We learned that iterations 1 and 2 resulted in better overall comprehension and understanding of urgency during walkthrough, and higher rates of task success.

 

Iteration 3 we decided to continue monitoring as it seemed to make some actionables too hidden.

Impact

Organizational Impact

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  • Built a deeper understanding of the traveler persona’s current experience throughout the journey which were leveraged in future projects targeting travelers

  • Provided clear next steps that product team could use to advocate for investing time in the project

Business Impact

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  • Completed follow-up testing and found that the new iterations minimized the visual distraction and improved success rate on the key tasks ​

  • Live version increased conversion rate by 12%

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Reflections

My perspective as a researcher in this project was important to question the assumption that the PM had made that all actionables were considered equal in terms of importance, and that usability alone was driving the low conversion rate.

First impression walk throughs of product pages are incredibly valuable when you want to know what catches users’ eye and what they feel they’d actually use.

Working with a small, engaged team of myself, the designer, and the PM allowed for quick iteration and testing. I was fortunate to work with a designer who had availability to join the research calls and who could iterate on the recommendations in a short timeline so that we could do follow-up research while initial findings were still fresh. This gave us greater confidence in our final recommendation.

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