Expedia: InsurTech
Multi-Product Coexsitence Strategy
InsurTech is Expedia’s insurance and fintech business unit, providing various protection options to travelers, no matter where their travels may take them.
ROLE
Sr. Design Director – Built and led the design team in defining cross-disciplinary process, conducting user research, user testing, UX design and prototyping.
TEAM
10 – User Experience Designers
03 – User Researchers
03 – User Experience Developer
Sr. Design Director – Built and led the design team in defining cross-disciplinary process, conducting user research, user testing, UX design and prototyping.
TEAM
10 – User Experience Designers
03 – User Researchers
03 – User Experience Developer
Expedia’s traveler funnel includes flights, cars, lodging, cruises and packages. Providing protection options for all traveler needs becomes challenging considering the need to balance numerous variables.
Funnel Ownership
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InsurTech provides all the insurance and FinTech offerings Expedia provides. The placement, targeting and configuration of each placement in the various shopping paths are a balancing act, coordinated with the team owning the path itself.
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InsurTech provides all the insurance and FinTech offerings Expedia provides. The placement, targeting and configuration of each placement in the various shopping paths are a balancing act, coordinated with the team owning the path itself.
Limited Real Estate
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Being that each page in the shopping funnel is highly specified and built around a core set of travelers, motivations, propensities and preferences, real estate is always limited. Additionally, introducing new elements have the potential to throw off the delicate balance of that pages primary function, thus it must be done so thoughtfully.
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Being that each page in the shopping funnel is highly specified and built around a core set of travelers, motivations, propensities and preferences, real estate is always limited. Additionally, introducing new elements have the potential to throw off the delicate balance of that pages primary function, thus it must be done so thoughtfully.
Competing Metrics
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Internally business units sometimes have differing success metrics by which they’re measured. This can directly affect design decisions and become challenging when collaborating across lines of business.
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Internally business units sometimes have differing success metrics by which they’re measured. This can directly affect design decisions and become challenging when collaborating across lines of business.
Approach
One cohesive solution wasn't going to come from InsurTech designing alone and asking for space. So I changed how the two teams worked together, starting before anyone designed.
Agree On Success First
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I brought our product partners together to agree on which metrics came first. A placement only worked if it grew our attach rate without costing Flights a booking, and every concept had to pass that test.
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I brought our product partners together to agree on which metrics came first. A placement only worked if it grew our attach rate without costing Flights a booking, and every concept had to pass that test.
Plan Openly
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I planned a workshop across business units and used design thinking tools to keep it open and democratic, so every team came in on equal footing instead of as a guest on someone else's page.
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I planned a workshop across business units and used design thinking tools to keep it open and democratic, so every team came in on equal footing instead of as a guest on someone else's page.
Work As One Squad
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InsurTech designers worked alongside designers from the teams whose pages we'd share. The people who owned the page helped shape what went on it.
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InsurTech designers worked alongside designers from the teams whose pages we'd share. The people who owned the page helped shape what went on it.
Diverge / Converge
We started wide, exploring many placements across several pages at low to mid fidelity, so both teams could weigh the tradeoffs together instead of negotiating one placement at a time.
The work converged on the fare card.
Content and placement on flight fare cards gave travelers the offer at the moment they were choosing a fare. InsurTech and Flights iterated on it together and co-created the testing strategy, so the results would answer both teams' questions.
One product, two jobs
In 2023, Price Drop Protection went from a paid add-on to a member benefit.
It became included for One Key Gold and Platinum members, so the same fare card now had to sell the product to some travelers and remind others they already had it. I directed the experience design through that change. The product has since returned $28M to members in a single year.
Results