This is the story of how Clearleft helped Virgin Holidays build its own design capability, change its approach to digital and get shortlisted for Digital Transformation at Wirehive 100 2018 Awards.
The travel sector is seeing ongoing disruption from new business models, such as Airbnb, as well as indirect, digitally-native competitors from outside of the traditional travel provider space, such as Google and its ever increasing suite of travel tools.
The ability for consumers to tailor their holiday experience to their own unique demands requires package holiday providers, and others in the travel industry, to radically and rapidly transform the products and services they deliver and, perhaps equally as important, how they deliver them. Issues of adaptability and agility at larger enterprises are also ongoing challenges where the pace of change is so disruptive that the average lifespan of a successful company has shrunk by over two-thirds over the last 50 years, to under 15 years.
Like many well-established bricks and mortar organisations, Virgin Holidays was looking at the means to deliver products and services more successfully via digital channels, whilst building a design culture for the future.
There were three implicit strands to our engagement:
Behind the blood, sweat and tears that went into rapidly increasing design output, there was always the implicit goal of something bigger. After 12 months, our key sponsor had committed to a pivotal decision: reshaping the digital team to be more sensitive to customer needs meant sacrificing some breadth of technical development in favour of user experience and design roles. There couldn’t be a bigger statement of intent or testament to what had been achieved.
Given the huge overlaps and dependencies between each of these challenges, it was clear that they would need to be approached as interdependent layers of the same problem: by solving one of these challenges, it would likewise benefit the others. Some of these challenges would also progress at a faster pace than others, given the fact that the delivery of online products and services, operational processes and culture change all happen at different speeds, and culture change doesn’t happen overnight.
Working on an ongoing quarterly basis, we began immersing ourselves into the various challenges ahead by spending the first few months partnering closely with the technology team to help deliver a series of initiatives against some aggressive end of year deadlines.
Part of our co-location within the technology team gave everyone a good practical opportunity to begin embedding an experience design methodology into an existing and mature Agile delivery framework. The organisation was already proficient in continuous delivery and also in the early stages of adopting a more sophisticated test and learn approach.
However, given the limited experience of applying user-centered design techniques – such as conducting lightweight primary research, rapidly generating ideas or iteratively prototyping and testing potential solutions before development – this ongoing design production support performed an invaluable role above and beyond its more obvious aim of delivering products customers love. By gathering direct insights and continuous feedback about the design process, we could fine tune what works for the nuances of Virgin Holidays, whilst also understand the existing status quo in relation to both design maturity and attitude to digital at the organisation.
Explore how we applied user-centered design practices in close collaboration to generate innovative ideas at pace in our Virgin Holidays design sprint case study.
Using the insights gathered through the ongoing design support within the delivery teams, including learnings from any approaches that were less successful, Virgin Holidays continue to implement a number of key improvements to their ways of working and design culture, including:
With the influence of a more sophisticated design capability beginning to show signs of progress, the digital leadership at Virgin Holidays can focus greater energy into shifting the mindset behind digital initiatives in a number of ways:
From being historically reactive in its approach, Virgin Holidays continues to evolve towards a collective mindset that is more proactive, flexible and individually empowering. As such, they’re increasing their ability to gain competitive advantage in a dynamic and disruptive marketplace.
