In the online travel industry, few names are as well-known as the Lastminute.com Group. The group, a European market leader, operates in over 50 countries with brands such as Lastminute.com, Bravofly, Volagratis, Rumbo, Jetcost, Weg.de, and others. Through its digital touchpoints, the group allows bookings for flights and trains from nearly 450 different operators and offers over two million accommodation options.
In 2017, Lastminute.com asked us to lead their Innovation Team trough an explorative path in order to find out new ways to present and erogate their users ancillary services. The following year we collaborated again, this time to directly improve their main product.
A Design Sprint to accellerate change
Design Sprint is a process invented by GV (Google Ventures), the investment firm of Google. We used it to help Lastminute.com evaluate new product concepts. Design Sprint was originally invented to optimize and test new digital business ideas. It is an extremely Agile way to build and validate a prototype in just five days.
We created a dedicated project team, formed by Moze designers and developers and by some Lastminute.com decision makers. We accurately followed the Design Sprint schedule to explore new product concepts:
- Understanding the problem
- Designing possible solutions
- Identifying the best one
- Creating a prototype
- Testing the prototype with potential users
The participants generated a range of different solutions through guided co-design activities, with the purpose of reach the initial goal. The shared process encouraged know-how exchange between team members, making it possible to quickly find the most appropriate solution and prototype it.
After building the prototype (a hi-fi visual mockup) we met and interviewed five potential users of the new product. They provided valuable suggestions to improve our solution.
Design Sprint allowed Moze and Lastminute.com to design and rapidly crash-test a new business solution. It wasn’t necessary to invest months in development and marketing nor a huge amount of money.
Guk Kim Chief Growth Officer, Lastminute.com
A new UX goal
In 2019 we were called to enhance the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) of Lastminute's flagship product, the Lastminute.com portal, with the aim of directly impacting business by improving the conversion rate.
Data-driven Design in Agile Mode
We started with a workshop to map the current state and identify key design opportunities, then we carried out a UX & UI Design process with an Agile approach. The project lasted seven months: for each monthly sprint, we worked with the Lastminute.com team to define the parts of the product to focus on and the activities to be carried out. These were design experiments of various sizes, based on quantitative information such as analytics and sales data provided by the Lastminute.com team, as well as strategic insights derived from user research using the Jobs-to-be-done technique.
The experiments included small features and major navigation flows, all having a significant impact on the user experience and business of Lastminute.com. Among these were:
- The selection of baggage associated with the ticket.
- The “flexible ticket” option.
- The checkout process.
- The final summary with purchase details that the user views just before making a payment.
Measuring success. Repeating the Experiment
Sprint after sprint, our designers delivered new design parts to the Lastminute.com Product Managers and developers, ready to be developed and quickly tested by users through rapid A/B testing cycles in production.
Winning changes were integrated into the portal’s interface, while others were returned to us, leading to new design experiments.
Working closely with the client’s management and technical team gave us the opportunity to make a significant impact in a short time within a complex organization and to improve a digital product with an important history, destined to remain a benchmark in the international travel industry.
