Customer Experience Strategy | Research | Analytics | Stakeholder Management | Stakeholder Workshops | User Journeys | Customer Research | Customer Interviews | Co-design Workshops | Competitor Analysis | Guerrilla Testing | Usability Testing Management | Wireframe

Discovery

Part of discovery was to ask the broad question, what have we set out to achieve and identify? This included

• Immersion into all relevant existing Qantas research done to date

• Understanding of user and business requirements

• Identify additional customer experience tasks that need to be undertaken in order to move into ‘Define.’

I needed to understand our customers, their pain points and their goals. We also need to understand our competition, what worked, what didn’t. The competitors' landscape review included airline, non-airline industries and best in class sites. I also set out to identify where business opportunities could be surfaced and acted upon.

Define

Domain product owners workshop

To align the business product owners, I initiated a conversational workshop designed to be open and engaging, with the primary goal of the session being: (Below I am using the royal ‘we’).

What we want from this workshop
What we don’t want out of this workshop
How we will use the output of this workshop

That way everyone would have a clear view of what we as a business were thinking and ultimately what were we trying to achieve.

The first kick-off session was split into three parts. With the questions being,

1. What does success look like?
2. What are the barriers to success?
3. And the final piece was to frame a ‘How might we…’ statement.

The stakeholders would write their comments on a Post-It and these would be arranged to display patterns and trends. They would then be further discussed and placed into a priority matrix, and voting would then commence, with stakeholders having three votes and placing their votes on what they believe is the key priority.

The session included an educational component on the ‘How might we’ statement, as numerous stakeholders were unfamiliar with this approach and had not previously participated in similar activities.

As a measure to gauge for value and purpose of the workshop activities, participants were asked via SurveyMonkey to rate their experience (you see what I did here? I wanted to get feedback and use those insights to improve on a ‘service’.) In order to identify what I needed to keep, tweak or elaborate on ensuring the workshop was a valuable experience to the business and how to improve going forward.

The stakeholder workshop insights were then synthesised and led to a co-design ideation workshop to a broader group, including other subject matter experts across the business, creative and technical talent. From the first stakeholder workshop, we now had our ‘how might we’ statement.

Ideation

The co-design workshop utilised the Crazy 8’s activity tool where idea generation, speed and rapid sketching is more important, over detail and beauty. From this session, many ideas were explored, discussed and voted on. All designs answering the question and mapping back to our ‘how might we’ statement. Three particular concepts received an equal amount of votes and were refined and created as low fidelity wireframes and presented back to senior business stakeholders for buy-in.

As part of the presentation, the three ideas were mapped out against the ‘what success looks like’ matrix and tech feasibility. The recommendation was to refine the ideas and create paper prototypes and produce low fidelity interactive prototypes, as the feeling was the ideas were very compelling and deserved further exploration.

Prototypes

Paper-based prototypes were explored, and further sketching took place. Moving into wireframes using Sketch, the ideas informed our decisions. At this point, we felt we had ‘just enough’ information to enhance the wireframes further and take a more high fidelity approach, as the next phase was to create interactive prototypes and present back to customers via one on one interviews.

Test and learn

To obtain qualitative data, guerrilla testing was conducted. For this activity, a small team visited Sydney domestic airport. I put together an interview research kit that broke down tasks to their simplest forms, this included using iconography and a range of predefined answers, thus saving the customer time. As a rule, when conducting this type of research, I am very mindful and respectful of customers giving their time for free. Although I do offer sweets (yes, that's lollies to you Aussie's) or chocolate at times which always seems to be a fair trade-off.

Also, the great thing about this interview research kit is it can be updated when conducting further research as more answers and behaviours are identified. The kit has also been shared with other teams who conduct research in this manner, ensuring a consistent approach across the Qantas research teams.

The outcome of the guerrilla testing led to more insights and further enhancements to the desktop version of the interactive prototypes. Over two days, in one hour face-to-face sessions, I facilitated the interviews and spoke with five customers to go through tasks and get their thoughts on the four concepts. As not to prejudice the concepts, they were shown in random order to the participants. Lookback was used to stream (and record) the session from the interview room to the ‘control’ room where the core team, including business stakeholders, had gathered to observe and take notes.

At the end of the first round of interviews, the concepts were scored out of five on the following criteria; usability, discoverability, awareness and tech feasibility. The successful concepts were updated from participants comments and into a second round a final round of face-to-face interviews. The second round included a mobile version of the prototype. However, due to the different platforms across the Qantas ecosystem, some huge issues and risks meant any solution to mobile would only be an interim one. Therefore testing for mobile was minimal at this point.