Empathy, Emotions and the Travel Experience
What we do at @Despegar´s UX Research team
Let me tell you a little story.
Jorge was invited to one of the interviews we usually make to get to know our users better. He was a man of around 50 years old and told us his experience traveling, he talked about how he travelled and how he planned his trips. We started with the basic questions from our script: How do you choose a destination? Who do you travel with? Who chooses where to travel? And so on. This continued until he started to talk about his last trip.
“We went to Southeast Asia and visited a millenary temple. It was crowded with tourists. While I was watching among the people taking pictures of a buddhist monk, the monk pointed at me among the crowd, he asked me to get closer and gave me this bracelet”
And while he kept telling his story driving us deeper into it, in the middle of the interview, he started crying.
At that point we didn’t know what to do. But something became obviously clear to us:
Travel is sacred!
Either to get to know different cultures, to open our minds, to accomplish a dream, to escape from our daily routine, or simply enjoy it with our families, we all love to travel.
Treat travel with respect.
At Despegar, we have a huge responsibility with the work we do. There’s no way of being the world’s best online travel agency or to bring the best service, without understanding what happens with people when they travel.
Because besides selling flights, hotels and trips, at Despegar we sell unique travelling experiences.
Understanding to transform
At the Despegar UX team we work to design experiences that get users closer and closer to the trip they dream about.
Our positive or negative perception about an experience leads us to decide whether we are going to buy something or not.
There’s no rationality without emotion. Whether we like it or not, our decisions are not purely rational.
By studying and understanding emotions, we can influence positively on people’s decision making. This way we can put ourselves in each other’s shoes and understand better what they need, offering a better experience and service.
How can we influence on people’s emotions? How do we generate a positive impact on people’s perception when they access Despegar?
We intent to achieve this through little details. And this details are achieved with empathy.
Understanding people
We as human beings have the natural tendency to empathize. Each and every one of us has this specialized neurons in our frontal cortex, called “mirror neurons”, which copy the behaviour we see in other people. This is the reason why babies imitate the faces we make to them, or why some people move their lips and seem to be talking while listening to someone else. This neurons are the ones that allow us to feel empathy.
At the Despegar User Research team, we search that feeling constantly. To understand other people. Understand how they feel, think, what mental pattern they use, and what goes on through their minds while they plan, decide and purchase their travel.
But not only that. We look to join users needs with technology and business. In order to achieve this empathy we search and ask questions. A lot of questions.
We systematically study the behaviour of our users, designing research plans both of qualitative and quantitative nature. We make up to 20 usability tests, interviews, and more than 50 surveys each month, adding that to workshops, remote tests, Journey Maps and other research tools.
We work shoulder to shoulder with the Data Science team to validate with Big Data what we found and to contribute with qualitative data to their analysis. They can bring the What, we discover the Why. The mixture of both worlds is explosive.
We never get tired of asking our users, and we hope they never get tired of answering us.
Our union makes us strong
What happens after we spoke with the users, asked everything, make the surveys and analyze their behaviour?
With that knowledge, and the insights of the research, we work together with the teams in charge of the Product, Design, Content and Development to add to the continuous improvement of Despegar as a product. All together we can materialize the empathy in our interface.
Digital Reality
As human beings we are really good at mapping our physical and spatial surroundings, but we are not good at understanding languages and digital environments. The work that we do at UX coexist with this issue. And this is why we live everyday advancing through trial and error. Each day we try to improve the user experience at Despegar, to make it a place in which clients feels at peace, taken care off and comfortable. A place that feels intuitively familiar. A place in which users can have incredible experiences, in which they can start living their travel at Despegar.
From interactions to experiences
Think about the last purchase you made at a supermarket or when you last got to meet someone. Each experience can be broken down to an infinity of interactions and micro interactions, which together in our minds construct a good or bad experience as we live them.
That’s why we work on every detail, in every interaction of our users with the product, as we do with a more macro look of the experience in its entirety. We aim to improve all of the user’s flow, from the first time they enter the home page, though the long process of payment, and even at the management of a product change in the after-sale service.
But this is not only from the perspective of the user, but also to the health of our business. Jorge told us something else that day. From this life you can only carry three things with you. Your love, your children, and travel.
Amen.
Despegar UX Research Team
We are already 14 people studying and understanding the behaviours of the Latin American travelers.
Are you passionate about travel, professional challenges and sharing experiences? Join our UX team and help other people like you, to have the best experience while building their travels at Despegar.com. Enter: http://www.despegar.com/sumate/
