Demystifying Travefy’s Feedback Request Feature

Case Study: Eliminating user confusion while improving workflow and increasing efficiency

Role: Design, Research, Testing

Timeline: 2 weeks

Tools: Figma, Miro, Notion, Intercom

What is Travefy?

Travefy is an award winning platform that provides tools for travel professionals to create experiences their customers love.

Travefy powers millions of itineraries for travelers across the globe and is the chosen tool for thousands of industry professionals to plan travel, win new customers, and manage client relationships.

Marketing images of the travefy system

The Problem

Travefy’s automated post-trip feedback system was unintuitive and difficult to set up resulting in frequent failed messages and misfires. It made travel advisors look unprofessional to their clients and for Travefy it was a source of public complaints on social media and multiple customer service tickets every week.

Here’s a look at where we started:

Trip Feedback Settings

Trip-level feedback tab

Research

To better understand the problem I conducted a review of conversations between users and our client success team. Three points of friction emerged:

  • This feature had very low discoverability. With controls buried deep in settings and no indicators that feedback was scheduled to send, many users didn’t realize automated feedback requests were a feature until their clients told them.

  • The system didn’t behave in the way users expected it to. Changes to global settings didn’t apply to existing trips and although settings could be changed at the trip level many users didn’t realize this.

  • Users didn’t have an easy way to confirm their settings in real time at the trip level

Compounding Problems: The combination of low discoverability, an error prone interface, the fact that changes couldn’t by applied retroactively in bulk, and the nature of travel planning being done months or even years in advance meant that users were frustrated again and again and again.

Key Changes

With this information in hand I coordinated with the engineering team to leverage existing components and develop the design solutions which would improve user experience the most while requiring the smallest amount of engineering work.

1. Improved layout and functionality in global settings

Feedback settings didn’t match user expectations. Users were frequently surprised settings didn’t apply to existing trips. Information that was buried in five lines of text describing the feature.

In addition to making making the copy easier to understand my design added an “Apply to All Trips” button. Not only did adding this function address workflow issues with the previous design but it also provided a visual cue to users regarding how the system functions.

Note: In this case the correct UI element would be a switch instead of a checkbox, however the code repo for our settings page doesn’t contain a switch component so that change was scoped by engineering.

2. Increase visibility of system status

Travefy already had a placeholder feedback tab visible on the main screen for each trip.

Adding on/off confirmation created heaps of system clarity with minimal increase in visual noise.

3. No more wondering about the status of feedback requests

The empty state content of the feedback tab was agnostic to system status despite the fact that this was the easiest to find feedback element in Travefy.  I added a status chip, helper text and, an on/off control.  

Testing

First, designs were tested and reviewed internally before being committed to code. Then, updates were released to select users participating in Travefy’s “Trailblazer” program for feedback before release.

Note: Looking back it’s clear we missed an opportunity to do usability testing with prototypes before starting engineering work.

We were fortunate that the solutions worked as expected but risked wasting engineering time building before ensuring there weren’t any usability issues.

Results

No more confusion. Since implementing the design changes Travefy has virtually eliminated customer service tickets related to this issue.

Improved workflow. 50% reduction in the number of clicks to change feedback settings at the trip level for future trips.

Enhanced workflow by eliminating dozens of steps for Travel Advisors to change feedback settings for existing trips.

Have a look at some of my other work

Eleyo Child Care App: Improving efficiency and security by designing against errors.

Travefy Marketplace: Pursuing increased conversion, and new potential revenue streams with a new core feature.