Expedia - data management portal
Redesigned Expedia's internal data platform, cutting time-to-insight for teams across 10 business units
MY ROLE:
• Conduct interviews to understand and align diff. stakeholder objective and user needs.
• Facilitation
• Information and architecture design
• Conduct Design sprints
• Brand logo design
ABOUT THE COMPANY:
A tool used across Expedia to enable Data Discovery. A thin UI layer that collects data from multiple pillars like data quality, change management, governance and metadata and enables discovery at a single place.
ABOUT THE TEAM:
I was the first designer to join the DMC team. I built the team of 2 designers along with my Principal product manager and Engineering manager to support the design sprints. We conducted design workshops and con
MY STRATEGY:
Experience when I started to work on the product:
My first step was to understand the product and the space. I started with competitive benchmarking, stakeholder interviews, and conversations with existing users — speaking to people across different personas to understand what they were already using the product for and what challenges they faced. I also took time to understand the technical environment supporting the product.
Key insights from User & Stakeholder Interviews
• Mismatch between system and the real world: The terminology is technical and difficult to understand for the user
• Lack of User Control and freedom: Users cannot navigate easily on the product architecture of DMC. No visibility for Data quality and change management
• Lack of Flexibility and efficiency of use: The UI is same for experienced as well as new users. no level of personalisation. Users need to remember all their actions
• Lack of user centric vision of the product: The UI is designed keeping in mind the business requirements and not the goals of the end users.
(Research techniques used: Competitive benchmarking, Interviews and focus groups)
The next step was to translate these designs to information architecture, create wireframes and get feedback from users and stakeholders.
WIREFRAMES :
We created two wireframe versions to gather feedback before finalizing the design vision. Given the volume of data and the range of request types each user had, the search bar had to be the central component. After creating the wireframes, we ran a stakeholder feedback workshop to discuss what was working, what could be improved, and what was missing.
VISUAL DESIGN
The final visual design of the homepage focussed on providing personalised quick insights to existing users and build trust for new users.
We also added an onboarding flow to talk about the product and build a personalised experience
A key component of using data effectively was filtering. I standardized the filter component across the platform so users could slice and dice data in different ways — this component was used extensively across tables and dashboards.
We also updated the dashboards to provide quick insights for executive leadership. We combined data from multiple dashboards into a single view, so leadership could get a quick read on the company's performance from just one dashboard.
IMPACT:
DMC was a product used across 10 of Expedia's companies to help them understand their data better.
1. The impact of good design
This was the first time I was independently leading a design team and a product. Effective storytelling helped me ship a superior experience. I could build trust across leadership to drive decisions through design.
2. Increased adoption
When I joined, the product was engineer-built and few users could operate it independently. My primary task was to enable users to work independently and derive insights on their own, thereby reducing support requests. When we released the first version, adoption grew from 100 daily users to 1,000 daily users.
3. Some things are not in your control
The company underwent a restructure, and leadership decided to outsource this function to a third-party tool — a decision that led to the team being dissolved. We tried to make the case against it, but the decision wasn't ours to make. It was a heartbreaking outcome for a team that had put in so much effort building the product.