Holiday Extras
Leading, implementing and evolving engaging customer experiences and UI foundations for every touch-point across various platforms.
Design Lead
My time at Holiday Extras has been challenging. Not because of the environment, industry or the people I work with, but because of the steep learning curve I've negotiated and the fantastic talent around me.
At its core, Holiday Extras look to provide 'Less hassle. More holiday' – a sentiment that truly runs through everything that we do in every facet of the business. To achieve this, the business has evolved into a fast-paced and efficient tech company that provides solid and intelligent UI foundations on which experiences can be built.
My brief when I joined was a simple one – unite our platforms and staff around cohesive and seamless customer experience. In practise this has challenged me in many ways – providing freedom of creativity and efficient processes and thinking to a team of designers, whilst providing structure and reasoning to engineers – all of which I'm yet to master, whilst also meeting the expectations of people interacting with the work we do and managing the expectations of various stakeholders.
Research
Behavioural insight is abundant within Holiday Extras, allowing us to effectively spot opportunity for improvement and accurately measure the impact of releases. Holiday Extras though, in terms of UI design, is business of two-halves.
On one side is an environment where marginal gains can make a big impact. Impact of design can be measured with pin-point accuracy and we use this as a large part of what informs the next iteration.
On the other side we are able to, in an app environment, experiment more with sentiment and customer engagement. Through prolonged variation testing, teamed with user interviews and feedback, we can, with more qualitative insight, evolve the experience over time and afford larger, more speculative iterations.
Combining the approaches like this gives us an all-rounded holistic view of our audience – not only steering the product development but also informing the style and tone of our brand.
Define
My approach to design in Holiday Extras has been more opinion the better. Collaborating on a solution, with everyone as peers, with every member of the team as equally responsible has not only sped up our delivery but measurably improved the experience for our customers.
We are a remote-first team, so the tools we use to define a product or iteration are vital.
As per my playbook we'll sketch ideas with the team – at least a 'pair-design' approach, but will more often than not include engineers, content writers, product managers and key stakeholders.
Depending on the team, this will be done using something like Invision's Freehand or on a whiteboard or pen a paper if we're all in the room (although, sometimes we'll do this digitally regardless, just to preserve the work indefinitely and for everyone to refer back to easily).
We'll use Sketch or Mockingbird to flesh out any wire frames or components, design in Sketch for anything new (using Abstract for distribution and feedback) and outside our pattern library, or go straight to code prototype where we can design animation and behaviour from the beginning.
Key features and products designed and delivered to date include:
- Defining, building and delivering a ’Gold Standard’ set of consistent (in design and build) universal UI components.
- Evolving a functional and ever-more engaging app experience.
- Driving consistency across multiple customer journey touch-points and building foundations that are easily and efficiently deployed.
- Continuously spotting opportunity for CX improvements and efficiencies.
Test. Iterate. Repeat.
My hope is always to develop quickly and iterate often, with an approach of good enough is sometimes all we need. Being able to design, develop and release quickly is our super-power and allows us to iterate quickly and regularly.
-vs-
Do the thing right.
This does take discipline.
Good documentation detailing of what we might have compromised on, continuous planning and the good practise of regularly retros, sprint discipline and team communication, is essential.
But this does allow the team to stay close to the impact of their work on customers and people's behaviour and the impact any design has directly on the business, which I believe to be essential for team engagement.
Finally...
Defining clear objectives and responsibilities for team members is important for team transparency and self-improvement, but effective design is a collaborative effort by a collection of subject matter experts – defining solutions with healthy debate and respect for the constraints and abilities of each person and technology.
I, and many others at Holiday Extras, work hard to continually foster and take advantage of this belief and culture to build great informed products and experiences quickly.