3 Lessons in Humanizing Digital Experience — An Observation From Offline Travel Fair
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With the year-end holidays approaching, families bustled through a suburban Kuala Lumpur mall, Malaysia, their faces aglow with anticipation for festive cheer. As they passed by our offline booth, the allure of affordable travel deals sparked a flicker of wonder in some. Here, amidst the bustling crowds, my team and I had a unique opportunity to witness a real-situation customer interactions firsthand. We’ve tirelessly worked behind the scenes to craft the best possible online experience. This time, we were able to observe them in person, capturing their latent travel needs.
In Dec 2023, Traveloka launched an Offline Travel Fair to expand customer reach and cater to diverse travel needs. The event offered exclusive deals for upcoming vacations, with our staff providing personalized assistance for booking flights, hotels, and activities. While staff were present to answer questions, the goal was to encourage app usage for transactions. From a design perspective, this provided an ideal opportunity to observe how our app functioned in a real-life setting, where users had genuine travel intentions.
Human-centered design is the heart of Traveloka Design team. One of the manifestations is we evaluate our design through sitting together with our customers, sharing a prototype, observing how they interact with it and asking further to see whether the design works. This method has proven successful in identifying design flaws and stress-testing our design decisions. However, it can sometimes lack nuance from the participants.
The reason is simple: usability testing participants complete tasks based on hypothetical travel scenarios, often lacking a concrete vacation plan in the near future.
On the other hand, observing customers in a travel fair offered a valuable alternative. Customers approached our booth with genuine travel intentions, ranging from those seeking the best deals to those with a rough itinerary in mind. This environment provided a much richer context for studying app interactions. Because customers were expected to use the app for purchases, we could observe how they interacted with the design when driven by real travel motivations. By witnessing their behavior in this setting, we gained valuable insights that would have been difficult to capture in a controlled testing environment.
Here’s what we have learned from two days observation.
#1 Decisions aren’t made in isolation
We encountered a diverse range of travelers: Parents planning school holidays, middle-aged women seeking summer getaways, and even a college student looking for an affordable flight ticket for his study abroad. While their motivations and considerations (when, where, and how) differed, a common theme emerged. The decision-making process for a significant life event like travel wasn’t as linear as we initially thought.
For example, a husband needed to discuss the total budget with his wife before booking. A woman needed to adjust her itinerary with a friend after finding a better deal. A student required his father’s help to locate his passport number before finalizing the purchase. These crucial steps all happened outside the core interaction between our sales staff and customers.
In app design, we are often told that conversion is king — the faster users move from search to booking and payment, the better. However, we often overlook the fact that users might need to pause the process to make decisions. They might leave the app to discuss plans, check documents, or compare prices. Our role as designers isn’t to force app usage in the hope of immediate conversions. Instead, we also need to care about assisting users with their “outside-the-app” activities and delivering the right message at the right time to nudge them back towards completing their purchase when they’re ready.
#2 Most people only care about their main intent
Observing users with real purchase intent provided valuable insights. It became clear that most users prioritize task completion speed. The onboarding process, from app launch to initiating their core purchase activity, should be streamlined and guided. Even a seemingly simple step like requesting a user’s name during onboarding can trigger critical thinking. Users may question the necessity of providing this information at that specific moment. Any task not directly aligned with their primary goal is perceived as friction. When these frictions accumulate, users readily abandon the app and seek alternative ways to complete their task. Thankfully, our physical presence at the travel fair allowed us to assist these customers. But when they are at home using our app independently, the story would be different.
Our direct observation also unveiled a fascinating aspect of user behavior on reading in the app. People don’t necessarily pore over every detail. We witnessed firsthand how a customer completely overlooked crucial information embedded within the user flow. Their focus was drawn instead to another element that visually resembled a “proceed” button, leading them to mistakenly believe it would advance them to the next step. This experience reminds me of a principle that users tend to adopt a scanning approach when completing a task. Their primary objective is to identify relevant information that helps them progress on their purchasing journey. Deep reading often takes a backseat until they encounter a section that directly aligns with their task or sparks their specific interest.
#3 Trust build through humane interactions
I once read that the digital divide affecting older generations isn’t solely about technical skills. It’s also about trust. They may be hesitant to complete online transactions without a physical presence to guide them. This concept became clearer when a couple visited our travel booth with a vacation plan to Japan already in hand. They came prepared, with specific travel dates, a budget, and their preferred airline. Unfortunately, the price for their desired travel date was already out of their budget. However, our sales agent able to find alternative dates so that they could book the ticket without breaking the bank. They explained that the sales agent’s tireless efforts to secure their perfect tickets made them feel appreciated.
This experience highlighted the importance of replicating this human connection within our digital product. The rise of conversational UX writing comes with the thinking that digital interaction must feel natural, human, and friendly. The app itself should function as a personal guide, just like a real person. Furthermore, like a determined sales agent, the app needs to offer alternative solutions if a user’s initial goals aren’t met. Ideally, there should be “no dead ends” — when search terms don’t show results or preferred flights are unavailable, the app must suggest options that help users find alternatives, potentially even influencing their initial plans.
Doing field observation wasn’t just about gathering data to tweak the app. It was a powerful reminder to keep the human element at the forefront. We saw customers not as anonymous users, but as travelers with dreams, anxieties, and shared journeys. Back at Headquarters, data points can feel abstract. Here, we saw the human stories behind every flight booked — a family reunion, a long-awaited adventure, a student embarking on a new chapter. We didn’t just pack our bags with insights from those two days, we came back with a stronger grip on one of Traveloka Core Values: Empathy.
If you find this topic interesting and would like to be part of Traveloka Design team to learn and build more exciting initiatives for Southeast Asia’s Leading Travel Platform, join us at Traveloka Careers.
