AVINODE B2B BUSINESS AVIATION

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Involved in strategic discussions (roadmaps, OKRs, initiatives)
Leading the experience design with different teams
Mentoring other UX designers (career planning, 1:1s, coaching)
Heading all UX research initiatives that involve the whole company
Collaborating with different teams to improve our design system
Improving UX team collaboration, synergies, processes, and tools

CASE STUDY: PRICING

I use design to improve our users’ charter sales workflow through the different products in our portfolio.

Due to NDA, the designs here are all wireframe based. This is mostly to act as visual aid to the case study. The focus is more on the thinking and the process

Background

We connect brokers and operators around the world through our marketplace offering

The team

Product Manager
UX Designer (Me)
Tech lead
Test lead
4 Developers

In the marketplace, price is a core factor for the system. Users are focused on getting the best deal for the best price. This means that buyers specifically would start with the cheapest trip and work their way upwards

Because of how the marketplace is set up, search results are sorted from cheapest to most expensive. The price that they would see here is set up on the seller side through their Pricing Settings.

This made sellers “game the system” by intentionally setting up their Pricing Settings to be the cheapest in the marketplace

How might we improve this selling behaviour to foster a fairer marketplace culture for all?

To help address this, we helped pricing be more objective by providing showing 2 prices from the seller. The seller price and an “adjusted price”- based on historical quoting habits

This proved to provide a positive effect for buyers and eventually we only kept the “adjusted price”

But this had some repercussions on the seller experience

There were a lot of efforts in understanding the buyer workflow that there weren't much focus on how this would impact the seller workflow

We got a significant amount of feedback

As an effect of this "estimated quote" feature, we would automatically add the "adjustments" to the quote breakdown of on the seller side. We noticed some sellers would just delete these "adjustments" every time

Sellers did not like this because they wanted more control over their quotes. It didn't make sense for them that we were "disturbing" their workflow by adding line items that, to them, did not have any basis. Everything else in the quote - the fuel prices, catering, fees - had a purpose except for this new line item called "adjustments"

Challenge

How might we improve the seller experience in order to both enhance the quoting workflow (rather than hinder) and maintain the same pricing accuracy they were providing?

Value Perspective

Considering that quoting is a vital part of their workflow, it is imperative that we can help them fulfil their tasks in the best way possible. This is also backed up by strong customer feedback Therefore, improving the experience definitely brings value.

Usability Perspective

Much of the challenges when it comes to usability were more on ensuring users understand the changes we would be introducing so that they can easily adapt these changes into their workflow.

Feasibility Perspective

Looking at the complexities with the team, there were some areas that were flagged as complex due to legacy code and dependencies but fortunately, much of the question marks in terms of feasibility were manageable and can be done within the expected time frame.

Viability Perspective

Considering that this particular area is a vital part of the portfolio offering, it is within our interest to make sure we invest in providing a quality user experience in order to retain our user base.

Discovery

I wanted to dig deeper to really understand the seller workflow and their pain points. I used three key methods to gather insights:

User Interviews

5+ remote interviews

Focus on experience

Tested high level concepts

Internal Meetings

Brainstorming workshops

Meeting subject experts

Async discussions via Slack

User feedback

Thematic analysis

Tagging incoming feedback

Analysing the different feedback items by organising them by themes

After getting all of the feedback, I held several workshops with my team to brainstorm the problem and solution space

My role

For this project, I was involved in leading the research initiative: formulating questions, planning, reaching out to users, running the interview, and documentation. These then helped me shape the solution along with input from my team which I got through workshops which I also facilitated

Big Idea

Focus on the seller price

From our user interviews, it became clear to us that we should not interfere with the seller quoting flow by adding our own line items. This meant that we were going to align our quoting features to ensure that the seller has full control over their quotes while we still kept the "adjusted price" on the buyer side since that is still valuable for them

Reevaluate the "adjustments"

Rather than us "forcing" these adjustments unto the seller quoting workflow, we wanted to keep this feature more as additional information. This meant sellers will still be able to have a reference to the price the buyer saw in their search. Furthermore, this encourages them to be more mindful of how much they are quoting their customers by visually showing this as a comparison

Remove this adjustment in the seller side for more control

Provide a reference to the price the buyer saw

This becomes an additional information rather than us interfering with their process

This is also reflected in other relevant parts of the workflow such as the overview page. Here the two prices are beside one another to emphasize the price the buyer saw and the price they are going to quote

Ensure the same changes are applied to all the touchpoints

Given the implications, the same experience should be expected in the other parts of the system such as email and mobile

What impact did this make?

Overall, it had a positive impact. We mostly measured this by seeing if we would get any feedback after release as well as monitoring the pricing accuracy behaviour of our users if we would get more inaccurate pricing or not.

Fewer feedback entries

There was a significant drop in feedback items about this topic. The reality is we won't be able to accommodate for all workflows. A few users sent feedback that they wanted the old system back due to convenience. But given that there were much more users who preferred the new system, as well as our strategic vision of more responsible pricing behaviors, this had a positive impact

Stable pricing accuracy

This new design did not have any sever negative impact on how accurate they price. This meant that users seem to be adopting the new system well and it did not have a negative impact in the accuracy of the quotes they send out (what the buyer saw vs the price they got after requesting)