SAP Concur Travel
Summary
SAP Concur has two main product areas: Travel and Expense. In an effort to modernize and simplify the user experience, I worked with our travel teams to conduct lightweight research efforts that helped to inform & evaluate design concepts at all phases of the process.
Rental Car Booking
Overview
The UX Design team working on the Rental Car Booking experience was fairly new to the product and wanted to leverage research as a way to understand human behaviors of booking rental cars for business trips. The team was specifically looking to understand:
What information was important to business travelers when booking a car?
What are the behaviors of business travelers when they book a car online?
For travelers using a service like Delivery & Collection, what pain points do they encounter?
My Role
As the lead researcher on the project, I partnered with the design team to understand their needs so that I could:
Develop the screener & recruit participants
Develop the interview guide
Execute the interviews
Facilitate a collaborative synthesis session with members of design, product, and engineering.
In an effort to encourage design-led research, my role was also to educated and support the designers on the project as they led the second half of all interviews conducted.
Kickoff
We started the project with a kickoff with design, research, product, and engineering to establish the timeline of the project as well as the needs and goals of each team.
One of the challenges of this research effort was that the product team was located in Germany, the design team was located in Vancouver, BC, and the research team was in Seattle, WA. Given the fact that we were so spread out, it was imperative that we were all aligned and involved from the beginning.
Approach
Given that the research ask was generative, I decided to leverage user interviews as a way to develop an understanding of the mental models and behaviors of these users. We decided not to target users based on their use of our product and instead focused on broad recruiting effort. Our target users for this study were users who:
Had traveled for business 2+ times in the past 12 months
Had booked a rental car for at least one of those business trips
I worked with my product and design teammates to ensure that our screener criteria targeted the right audience. Once confirmed, I kicked off a recruiting effort using Validately and we secured 10 user interviews for the following week.
Simultaneously, I developed an interview guide to use during the sessions. Members of the product and design teams were encouraged to provide feedback so that they were aware of what types of learnings would be gained from each session. Through this partnership I learned that the size of company that individuals worked for was important for our product teams to know, so I incorporated that into our final interview guide.
Execution
Since the UX Research team at SAP Concur was quite small, it was important for us to encourage designers to lead their own research efforts wherever possible. With enthusiasm from the design team, we decided to take this as an opportunity for them to lead some of the user interviews.
Of the 10 interviews conducted, I led 6 while the two designers each took on 2 interviews apiece. The designers were responsible for attending every session as notetakers on both the participant responses and the research execution. We encouraged product team members to also join the sessions, whenever possible. Since the product team was in Europe, we hosted early-morning sessions to accommodate their time zone.
After each session I debriefed with the design team on the participant responses and answered any questions they had about the execution of the interviews. We hosted several practice sessions to make sure that they felt comfortable moderating the interviews. Once they took over, I moved into a research consulting role and provided detailed feedback after each session in order to prepare for the next. By the end of all 10 interviews, the design team had gained confidence in their ability to moderate user interviews and developed a deeper understanding of the research process.
Synthesis
At SAP Concur, we believe that research is a team sport, and that includes the synthesis. In order to accommodate our global team, we hosted a remote synthesis session using Mural. This was our first time attempting a remote synthesis session using this tool and I was in charge of facilitation.
Prior to the synthesis session, participants were asked to review the videos & highlight key takeaways and quotes to bring to the session. Then, we used a 1.5 hour block of time to record, affinity map, and discuss the findings as a group.
We took the first 15 minutes to capture key quotes and findings onto sticky notes using Mural. Then, the next 30 minutes were spent affinity mapping these sticky notes simultaneously. All discussion was saved until the end of the affinity mapping session. Once complete, we moved through each group one by one and discussed why certain items were grouped together and what themes emerged. This was an excellent way for our product and design teams to make the connections between what was heard in the interviews to actionable changes in the product.
Key Takeaways
Throughout this fast-paced research effort there were a few learnings that stood out:
Always involve your extended partner teams, and make accommodations for their schedules. Their involvement in the research process is invaluable and will only strengthen over time.
Create opportunities for design and research to overlap. By inviting the design team to lead their own interviews, they developed a deeper understanding of my role as a researcher and how to partner with research on future efforts.
Keep experimenting with your tools. We had used Mural as a way to capture ideas, but never as a collaborative synthesis tool. Since this study, we have used Mural as our go-to synthesis method for in-person and remote teams.