On a mission to transform how you discover music.
Skyscanner
A world-class kickstart for travellers on mobile
Story
As a Product Designer at Skyscanner, I proudly helped our business to become one of the largest travel brands with over 100 million active users. I had a particular focus on leading design initiatives to provide intuitive first-time user experiences.
Learnings
During my time at Skyscanner, my exposure to the following areas collectively shaped my mindset and deepened my understanding of research and data, therefore made me a better designer.
Undoubtedly, the most profound takeaway from my time at Skyscanner was a deeper understanding of people from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Working across Budapest, London, Edinburgh and Shenzhen offered a unique opportunity to immerse myself in diverse cultures, fostering an awareness of global perspectives and dynamics. Spending a month in China taught me a lot about how locals live their everydays, interact with technology and use the internet.
Great design choices are always lead by data.
Used extensive user research and analysis to deeply understand user needs. Conducted usability tests with users from all around the world, spanning from South Korea to the US. By harnessing this data, we could create experiences that are finely tuned to user needs, ensuring each design decision is backed by real-time analytics and resonates deeply with users.
Fostering a culture of learning and growth.
By holding in-house prototyping workshops, I could empower fellow designers to expand their skill sets and contribute more effectively to design objectives. I also inspired the design team with bi-weekly creative sessions showcasing how solutions from companies like Spotify, Snapchat and Tinder could be applied to the travel problem space.
Understanding the benefits of cross-functional teams.
Learned the basics of how a tribe structure works and how autonomous teams could efficiently be aligned toward high-level goals. By working hand in hand, these teams tackled problems from all angles, making decisions faster and whipping up solutions.
Taking an active role in a large-scale brand transformation.
In collaboration with the incredible creative team at Studio Koto, our design team brought a brand new identity to life. I specifically concentrated on implementing this new brand into the mobile apps.
Achievements
My contributions to Skyscanner's mobile apps led to significant uplifts in product activation, user sign-up rate, transactions and marketing reachability. Still, I believe my primary imprint has been in the continuous pursuit of refining design processes and inspiring everyone, including myself. The following projects generated substantial value for our users, the company and my professional growth.
Led the design of signup and login experiences in the apps introducing a simplified flow.
These designs included signing in with Apple (SIWA), new GDPR handling, better placed and formulated messages and many more features causing a major boost to new user sign-up rate and marketing reachability. With out cross-functional team, we shipped a completely new interactive onboarding experience focused around trip planning as a whole instead of separate verticals, causing a significant uplift in product activation and transactions amongst new users.
case study coming soon
In the course of Skyscanner’s efforts in evolving its mission, I was part of a small team working on core trip planning experiences.
The aim of this conception was to identify optimal methods for trip planning, leaving more doors open to users as entry points. For example, these new journeys also worked for people who were uncertain about their travel destination or timeline. This concept was highly influenced by the foundational work of my cross-functional team with the new interactive onboarding experience mentioned earlier.
Developed a semi-autonomous solution for designing and localizing our App Store visuals in 34 languages.
This task emerged from the rebrand, which led to brand new visuals in the App Store and Google Play Store. In the past, these visuals were constantly changing, every department constantly demanding a piece of the cake. Also, it was difficult to manage translations on a global scale. To support our massive rebranding efforts and solve these problems, we reorganized the workflows on one side. On the other, I implemented a new, simplified method for updating designs. We designed templates for each feature and asked the team to fill up a spreadsheet with matching, localized copy. All the rest happened in a few clicks, saving countless hours of work for the team.
Teamed up with a fellow researcher to devise a dynamic visual system for clustering traveller types and predicting changes in travel preferences.
This system employs various numeric factors as axes related to trips, measuring changes in each. By incorporating certain qualitative metrics, these values form a foundation for clustering. Travel preferences change all the time. A traveller who tends to go on quick getaways can still be interested in a longer holiday trip, vice versa. If we collect and analyze these trip preferences, we could find potential patterns and predict how they will change for different traveller types.
A brand new identity was crafted by the incredible creative team at Studio Koto alongside a significant evolution in our company mission.
To lead the global transformation towards modern and sustainable travel, there were significant changes implemented across the website and the mobile apps. The design team brought the identity to life with brighter and bolder UI using color inspired from destinations around the world, stunning new photography, illustration, a new icon suite and the debut of Skyscanner Relative, our custom cut typeface. I specifically concentrated on shaping and implementing this new brand into the mobile apps.
Final Thoughts
My journey led me elsewhere, prompting my departure from Skyscanner. I keep some of the dearest memories from this time in my career.
