Virgin Holidays
Virgin Holidays have been arranging holidays since 1985 and are the largest, most successful transatlantic tour operator, and market leader for travel to the USA and the Caribbean. They are passionate about creating the best holidays in the world and go that extra mile to make sure their customer get exactly what they want. As such, the role of user experience designer at Virgin Holidays is a natural fit.
Background
Whilst at Virgin Holidays I was involved in two major projects, one to revisit their service for customers who have already bought a holiday and the other (which I lead) was to develop a new service for customers who wanted to travel to more than one destination (whether they knew they wanted to yet, or not). Aside from these longer-term assignments, I also assisted with business as usual improvements to the core booking process and post-purchase holiday management system. Non-disclosure agreements limit how much I can say here but I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few pieces of work.
Value proposition
At the start of one of the larger, stand-alone projects I ran a value proposition workshop, based on the useful toolkit created by Strategyzer. We went through a process of booking a specific type of holiday, thinking about all the things that would concern us before, during and after booking.
By creating an empathy map and prioritising customers jobs, pains and gains, we were able to gain significant insight into what would improve the booking process for our core customers.
Collaborative, agile working
During my time at Virgin Holidays I always had the benefit of working in agile, cross-functional teams. This meant I could work closely with the developers and technical architects to ensure the recommendations I made could be implemented in a timely and cost-effective manner. For example, I worked closely with a few of the developers across the team to develop a style library in code as well as colours and fonts. By involving the wider team throughout the library creation, we all felt a shared ownership and responsibility of keeping the library up-to-date.
“The quality of [Tim’s] work is extremely high and he is able to work under his own initiative. Tim is able to engage and influence different stakeholder groups and he has helped us develop our UX and Design practice. He is well liked by everyone in the team and I would definitely hire him again.”