Context

A luxury hospitality brand had done ample research to understand what its customers – existing members and prospective guests – wanted and needed while booking their hotel stay, but needed more ideation around how to support other parts of the travel experience.

Challenge

Define requirements and design concepts for the initial MVP feature set of a mobile app. The app should meet the needs of three tiers of members, two tiers of non-members, as well as individual hoteliers and the overall brand. Emphasis was on meeting or exceeding guests’ needs while allowing each hotel and resort to maintain and promote their unique benefits, and more fully communicate on-property amenities and activities.

Approach

Because the client had come prepared with customer research, and had done months of internal work to align on brand values and overall product strategy, we started in a great place to drive ideation. We quickly identified where holes existed in our understanding – particularly, the on-property guest experience – and mapped assumptions against existing user data. Personalization was an important theme that informed our feature set, and solution ideas were created against eight areas. The prototype was tested by two groups over two days: users representing different tiers of membership, as well as select hoteliers, and we added an additional week for updating the prototype and create a draft backlog of user stories.

Outcome

The response to the prototype was extremely positive, and we received interesting feedback on the tone of messaging within the app; this was an audience that preferred direct language, but not informal language. Testing made it clear what to improve in our prototype, and where we might want to expand the feature set. After the sprint, we presented findings to the company’s executive committee at their annual meeting, and successfully demonstrated the brand’s commitment to faster agile processes through design thinking methods.

Context

A payroll company was struggling to attract millennial customers, and wanted to explore the idea of creating a new product based on the specific needs as emerging business owners while remaining competitive with other service providers. Slalom was engaged for a few weeks initially to conduct ethnographic customer research, observing customers at work, interviewing them in context of their payroll activities, and then surveying a broader group of new business owners. Insights from this research informed the customer experience map created on the first day of the sprint.

Challenge

Test the hypothesis that a low-touch, onlne self-service service model with a new brand would attract and retain new business owners, mostly representing a younger demographic.

Approach

As a successful legacy brand, the client wanted to market their experience while presenting a subset of their services in a fresh, approachable way online. They knew this customer segment did not want to meet agents in person, or talk on the phone, and feature ideation was focused on simple package options with transparent pricing. Most of all, branding needed to reinforce to these customers that the product was valuable to people like them.

Outcome

Testing revealed that there was a clear need to service this demographic in new ways, like building additional community features that had nothing to do with payroll. We updated package options to emphasize price over flexibility, removed certain interactive features from the homepage after realizing customers needed to build trust with the brand immediately, and added new features to the roadmap. Slalom stayed on the project to update the prototype after the design sprint, and the client’s internal UX took it forward from there to continue design and testing.

Context

A financial client wanted to revamp their program management web app experience for mid-market cardholders.

Challenge

Their goal was to surface the various account data points at the right time through the right channel, so that cardholder program admins could make decisions or take action.

Approach

The team mapped out a 12-stage experience, added pain points, and voted on two stages to focus on for ideating solutions. They articulated solution ideas as user stories to guide sketching, then drew feature and functionality ideas around improving the reporting interface, training materials, and reducing downstream impacts from account setup.

Outcome

Improvement areas were summarized in sections: quick wins, longer-term recommendations, and system recommendations. Testing revealed that valuable information could be exposed in better ways throughout the interface, and at different parts of the user’s journey – particularly during onboarding. An FAQ section was proved to be a valuable addition, and system changes were added to the roadmap to improve the overall experience. In the end, the client took the design sprint prototype and, over time, moved it in a new direction that was then tested and validated with their customers.

Context

A large insurance company serviced many small business owners, but their sign-up process primarily happened over the phone. The business knew they wanted to create an online process for "DIY" customers to complete the process on their own through a simple system that used plain language. They were just completing a lengthy customer research phase, so behaviors, personas and pain points had already been identified.

Challenge

The company wanted to envision both a near-term and future-term solution for all customers, but keeping in mind one customer persona in particular that they felt had specific needs.

Approach

Using pre-determined pain points, we mapped out a high-level customer journey map for their current state solution, discerning between the needs of different personas. While it was obvious which section of the journey to solution, we took time as a group to brainstorm solution ideas (or "design requirements") for the pain points that received the highest number of votes. This helped guide the sketching process, which resulted in two prototypes – one implementable in the short term, and a second for a more intelligent system representing an imagined future state that incorporated AI.

Outcome

After testing with users matching the target persona, we got clear validation of the overall process, and learned which areas needed more explanation or human intervention. We also validated that our second prototype would be well-received in future.