Localising UX Design for a New Market: An Interview with Camille Gribbons
Camille Gribbons, UX designer at Booking.com, reveals how she first got into the industry and shares valuable lessons about the unique challenges of designing for a brand new market when you are halfway across the world
Camille Gribbons had always pictured herself on Broadway. At 18, she had done musical theatre for six years, performing in community shows in her home of Phoenix, Arizona, and had become a local celebrity. She auditioned for acclaimed theatre programmes all over the US but failed to get into the big universities, so she entered Arizona State University to pursue an exploratory major.
“It’s for people who have no idea what they want to study,” Camille chuckles. “For the first couple of years I switched my major probably every six months. I started out with Mandarin because I wanted to travel the world but it turned out the programme at my school feeds people directly into the CIA, and I didn’t want to spy on people! Then I looked into political science, global studies, psychology and teaching, but none of them could really hold my interest. Then, one summer in between semesters, I quit my student job as a housekeeper and came across this get-rich-quick scheme online.
The basis was to create a website for a niche audience, get a good amount of traffic, and integrate it with Google Ads or affiliate marketing in order to make a nice monthly income.”
Being a fan of The Bachelor franchise, Camille decided to build a simple site on Squarespace and took some classes online for how to advertise on Facebook. Needless to say, she didn’t get rich but she discovered she really enjoyed the creative aspect of designing the website and customising it with basic HTML and CSS. So she switched her major once more, this time to graphic information technology, which covered web and graphic design, photography and animation.
Learning on the job: working mornings, nights, and weekends
Camille then got the opportunity to study in Brisbane as part of an exchange programme. Even though she was initially disappointed (Australia had not been on her radar at all but Queensland University of Technology was the only school abroad that enabled her to gain credits for her course of study), it turned out to be the best possible career move. As soon as she arrived, she started reaching out to every software and web company in the area to ask for an internship. Email marketing software company Vision6 took her on and eventually hired her as its resident junior web designer. Camille was mentored by its UX designers and pursued various other freelance opportunities for local small businesses around Queensland. When she wasn’t studying, she was working mornings, nights and weekends to build up her skillset.
“When it rains it pours,” Camille recalls. “I redesigned Vision6’s website, and suddenly freelance work was just coming in. I was building and redesigning sites, helping with branding, graphics and print material — everything under the sun. It was almost like school was just my way to be in Australia. I was still going to classes but everything I learned in web and UX design I basically learned from working on the job.”
As her course was coming to an end and she had to decide what she wanted to do with her career, Camille started applying to all the big companies — Uber, Google, Twitter, Facebook etc — but wasn’t successful. Then she reached out to one of her mentors at Vision6 who had joined Booking.com in the Netherlands. He referred her, and within a month and a half of interviews, Booking.com flew Camille out to Amsterdam in order to
take part in the final round. She was accepted into the company’s graduate programme and so relocated to Amsterdam. From middle-of-nowhere Arizona straight to a major hub after graduation, it was a dream come true.
Launching an app from 7,057 miles away
Camille was keen to work for a market completely different to her own and learn localisation techniques. As Booking.com was building up its strategies for emerging markets, she joined a team that initially was tasked with focusing on Japan, Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia. It was the latter that became Camille’s focal point for the next year.
“Indonesia was identified as one of the fastest growing markets in Southeast Asia,” Camille remembers of the time. “They were experiencing an internet boom, and everybody was suddenly buying and booking things online. Usually people would just walk into a hotel and book it there and then, but now they were starting to book rooms online beforehand. I heard that Booking.com was experimenting with an idea to compete with the local players, and I thought that it was so exciting. It was brand new, we were building something from scratch — almost like working at a startup — and owned every part of the process!”
At a Booking.com hackathon, Camille collaborated with a front-end and back-end developer as well as business stakeholders to build an early version of a new localised travel app called BookingLokal, which ensured they got signoff and allocated the necessary resources for the project. They had no idea how challenging it would be to tackle a market from 7,057 miles away.
The team started work with a series of assumptions they’d been given, before any of them had ever visited Indonesia. They had been told that even though people in Indonesia now had access to the internet, network conditions were slow, and mobile devices were low end. So they had to build the lightest site possible, which ruled out animations and many images. In addition, they had also been briefed that users in Indonesia simply wanted the cheapest hotel possible, and that was their end game. Those assumptions turned out to be incorrect but unfortunately, the project’s first product manager — due to fear of scope creep — had implemented a rule ensuring all communication had to go through him, withholding vital insights.
“There was no direct communication between the team in Indonesia and us,” Camille remembers. “They had been giving him all this feedback about the work that we were doing, that the design was too European, that it wasn’t localised — but we weren’t being told any of it.”
“This design sucks”: the importance of cultural perspectives
Camille and her team were then sent to Indonesia to sense the market and test the prototype they had put together within a couple of weeks. The first thing she saw on a whiteboard in the local office were the words “this design sucks”. Camille was shocked. She couldn’t believe it was referring to her designs because she had designed for the user that she had been given. The brief, however, had been completely wrong.
“The internet wasn’t slow, as it turned out, it worked perfectly fine,” Camille
sighs. “And sites were using a lot of animations, photos and loud and bright colours. We also found out that it wasn’t about the cheapest hotel for users. They are bargain hunters. They are looking for a high-quality hotel but they’re aiming to game the system and hunt for coupons and discounts to get the cheapest price possible. Eventually we almost added friction to the process, so they had a way to look for promotions and deals.”
The team in Jakarta staged an intervention with Camille. “They told us that they couldn’t launch BookingLokal with this minimalist design and subdued colour palette. It wouldn’t be successful. I didn’t understand why this feedback hadn’t been used to inform the direction of the product. I didn’t really know anything about Indonesia, but it was our local team’s culture. It didn’t matter that they were a marketing and operations team and not product people, they were the experts. It was a pivotal moment. From there I worked hard to completely open up communications channels.”
The product manager ended up leaving on his own account, and the new one ensured the team in Jakarta was involved at every stage of the process, from design sprints to user testing. This time the team really immersed themselves into the culture. Booking.com worked with a user testing agency that recruited users and set up user interviews to understand the audience’s basic motivations and needs for travelling.
“Apart from usability tests and watching users interact with our product and the competition, we also did street testing. As the local team was mostly focused on social media, we trained them to go out to the malls, which are huge in Indonesia, and get some feedback on BookingLokal on the fly. We had to establish a lot of feedback loops, and of course there are still challenges, but it was really valuable to learn from the local team. There was just no way to be successful without their help.”
The project went live and grew in customers as new iterations were released but in December, Booking.com shut it down due to the company switching priorities. Camille moved to the payment component team, which she describes as an internal Stripe service, to work on a consistent payment experience for all users across Booking.com’s funnel. The lessons she learned on the BookingLokal project helped her boost her skills as a young UX designer. She subsequently shared them in a conference talk at events such as Amuse UX and Talk UX.
Balancing business and user needs
“People tell designers their only focus should be the user,” Camille points out. “We’re the champions of the users and we need to fight their corner no matter what. Yes, of course, the user is important, and you should really understand them. You need to first fulfil your user’s basic needs and expectations before you even start to think about innovating. But what this project taught me is that you also need to balance the needs of the business and the team if you want to be taken seriously and get things done.
You have to take a minimum-viable-product approach, you have to make compromises, and you have to find the best balance between development, design and business. In order to really have a voice in the strategy, it’s important to focus on all three areas, and that’s something that is currently not being taught a lot. I’m now working hard to bring everyone into the design process and make sure they’re really involved.”
This article originally appeared in issue 332 of net magazine in 2020 and has been reviewed by Camille Gribbons prior to republication.
