How content design helps the Skyscanner product to land
As a content designer who works for Skyscanner
I want to share how we work within the company
So that other designers might learn from our successes and mistakesI worked up a TL;DR in the form of a user story, cute — I know. But it’s important that you understand the journey I’m about to take you on and be up front about this content, so that you can decide quickly if it might be worthy of your time or not.
Because that’s the aim of any content designer. Communicating in the most user-friendly and efficient way for an audience.
My job here is not to teach you about content design, Sara Winters does that way better than I ever could. But it is to illustrate how content design shows up in the Skyscanner product, with examples of areas we’ve been working on recently, from the designers who actually did it.
Up first.
Harnessing AI
Starting strong with the topic on everyone’s lips. It seems as though you can’t browse Slack, LinkedIn, or <insert other work-related tool here>, without seeing AI. It’s coming for all of us, and for better or for worse, written word content seems to be first up. As content designers at Skyscanner though, we’re not worried. Let me tell you a few ways we’re leaning into AI instead of shying away from it.
AI-generated content
One of the ways we’re getting to the forefront of AI is by working with an external agency to create AI-generated content, at scale.
We’re working towards create=ing destination landing pages that rank well for SEO but are actually useful for travellers. If you’ve worked in content at all, you’ll know this is no mean feat — especially for the amount of destinations we want to cover. This is why we’re trialing AI.
The problem here is that when ChatGPT generates content at scale, there’s a lot of risk involved. It can ‘hallucinate’ and say some, frankly, odd things. It can speak in strange tones and, sometimes, it can give advice that’s completely wrong or even dangerous. On top of this, it can write in quite a robotic way — something that we try really hard not to do at Skyscanner.
So what did we do?
We manually checked content, and helped refine the content creation process in order to eliminate risk. This included working with the agency to fine-tune the prompt, feeding back on content (round after round), and working out a traffic light system for high-to-low risk destinations, from a political, historical or geographical standpoint. — Helen Selby
SEO Content Designer, Helen Selby, and the rest of the SEO team have learnt that while the tone of voice still isn’t perfect (we’ve learnt that you need a human writer for that), we’ve reached a point where we had the confidence to put the content in front of travellers. We can trust the AI to create fairly useful, easy-to-navigate content.
AI summaries
The Skyscanner Hotel details pages contain heaps of handy reviews written by travellers. While that’s great, not every user has time to read through each and every one, and reading a couple of reviews doesn’t always give the best overview of a hotel. As content designers, we want users to be able to get the information they need, quickly.
So again, we enlisted AI to summarise the content of hotel reviews written by users.
The idea behind this is relatively simple, but the SEO team recognise how helpful this can be for travellers using Skyscanner. Using ChatGPT to experiment with review summaries, content designers got involved to create and refine the prompt, finessing it until the outputs were at a useful, engaging and honest level.
The result?
After rounds of faffing, nonsense-wading and more arguments with ChatGPT than we’d care to admit, we achieved some pretty great review summaries. The experiment is yet to go live, so watch this space! — Helen Selby
Discover with AI
As designers, we’re happy with a process — safe, in fact. But sometimes there comes a project that requires slight deviation from the norm, and creating an AI specific feature was one of them.
Our AI search tool differed from the regular product design process in that there was no distinct problem to solve. The core goal of the Proof of Concept was to learn. So, we created a tool which would serve up three travel destinations (and prices, if available) in reference to free text user inputs.
Our Engineering teams and project leads knew that working with a Large Language Model in this context would most probably need the eyes of a content designer. Philip Wilson was tasked with the job.
From a content design perspective, most of the work was focused on rewriting the instructions that we sent to the LLM… Such as avoiding risky locations, using clear and inoffensive language, and keeping things short. Basically, trying to get it to behave itself. It was kind of like trying to set rules for a particularly verbose toddler that’s constantly trying to find loopholes. — Philip Wilson
The result was a successful search tool which proved its own feasibility and ticked over 6 million users in a couple of weeks.
The next iteration will be to create something that can provide deeper insight, solve more relevant user problems, and hopefully stop repeating itself repeating itself repeating itself quite so often.
Getting involved early on
‘Saved’ project
We’re not pretending being able to save something for later on a website or in an app is groundbreaking here. This isn’t some sparkling new feature that breaks the internet. It is, however, a functional necessity when you’re dealing in large amounts of inventory that people need to sort through, think about, and come back to later.
At Skyscanner, we knew that the added USP of price alerts when users Saved would set us apart from our competitors.
While a huge amount of work goes on in the background to make things like Saved happen (head over to our sister blog on Engineering at Skyscanner if you’re keen learning more), this key benefit was also all about messaging: how do we explain these extra features on an already-established mental model?
Senior Content Designer, James Wesson, knew that having a content designer involved in early conversations and design decisions would mean that user needs — such as saving items for later and keeping up to date with prices — were both considered. He wanted to avoid convoluting the overarching messaging that explains the feature’s purpose.
Owing to the end-to-end, multi-platform, multi-vertical presence of Saved, it was a real team effort involved in shaping the feature. With this, it brought a big need for collaboration across all corners of the business. Having content design at the table has meant we’ve been able to make customer-focussed decisions when it comes to the content and proposition at all parts of the design process. — James Wesson
The lesson here is that bringing content designers in early on in the process will help teams to think more holistically about what content actually meets the need of the user, as opposed to bringing them in at a later date and hoping they’ll smarten up some words for you.
Collaborating with teams beyond design
Lifecycle Marketing
Now, at Skyscanner we are (as far as I know, anyway) relatively unique in that our product and content designers work closely with top of the funnel marketing teams. Instead of utilising the talented team of copywriters we have over on the brand side of things, we employ content design practices.
The reason here is relatively simple. We want users to feel as if there is a seamless journey from inbox to product.
Many of our content designers have had the pleasure of working with the LCM team, myself being one of them. Not only is it great for our marketing, but it also allows us as designers to get a holistic view of how users will enter the product and work collaboratively to best reach people.
Emre Guney, Head of Global Marketing, Lifecycle talks about how this collaboration has helped drive engagement:
In our work at Skyscanner, Content Design plays a critical role. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s about delivering real value to our travellers. The right experience can completely shift how people view our brand, their interaction with our communications, and their overall engagement. Our collaborative approach, especially evident in workshops, leads to practical solutions.
A notable example from last year was the collaboration between our Content Design and Product Design teams. Following a workshop on Deals, they provided new designs and content to the Lifecycle team, enabling a series of rapid experiments throughout Q3 2023. This initiative was successful in significantly raising our Deals emails’ click-through rate from 0.4% to approximately 0.6–0.7%. — Emre Guney
To wrap up
Let’s circle back to our goal:
As a content designer who works for Skyscanner
I want to share how we work within the company
So that other designers might learn from our successes and mistakesThese are merely a sample of the types of projects we’re working on at Skyscanner. We also get involved in areas of Localisation, accessibility and more — maybe we’ll cover them in a later post.
Hopefully an example of how we get content design integrated into early stages of a project is enough to inspire teams to harness our skillsets sooner in the process. And our foray into the world of AI has inspired you to utilise it, even if it takes some iterating on how this works for you.
Keen to understand more about content design at Skyscanner? Get in touch! If you’re looking for design roles, we have a few over on our careers hub, why not check them out.
