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Overview

Tripadvisor Plus was launched in 2021 to offer travelers ways to unlock special rates and privileges. Post-MVP, our team in Singapore did an extensive audit on the service to take it to the next level. This resulted in the outputs of a unifying Service Blueprint and adhoc support on product and marketing design.

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My Role

Designer and Collaborator

Auditing the Plus experience
Planning and facilitating some areas of the workshop
Led brainstorming session for Service Blueprint
Contributed to the Service Blueprint content
Proposed a deck in addition to the Service Blueprint to give an overview to stakeholders as they’re not always familiar with Figma
Co-presented the Blueprint

Goals

To audit the existing Tripadvisor Plus experience, to find shortcomings, and benchmark it against similar products
To align stakeholders on what could be done post-MVP

Challenges

MVP vs future

Plus is at the juncture of having already shipped an MVP and receiving a lukewarm response, and we’re embracing ambiguity while helping define next steps

Design leadership

Bridging the Product Innovation Team (us, in Singapore) and the core Product, UX and engineering team of Plus in the US. This is a defining moment where we can gain trust for the long term

Scope

Product (re)discovery

Post-MVP, we need to find out the current product’s offering, their shortcomings, and what we can keep for the future. We also need to rediscover what it means to offer Plus for customers. We can do this through. series of research or workshop.

Product design

The team also needs some hands-on help on existing initiatives. We do this by getting involved directly with product and engineering to work on design projects.

Approach

This is a new area for our team in Singapore so we wouldn’t want to “jump to conclusion”, so we used a three-step approach:

Building context: We wanted to make sure we immersed ourselves in what the product (Plus) is all about, by interviewing, auditing and reading past documents, or even using the product itself
Gathering and unifying stakeholders: We wanted to know the teams and people responsible for Plus, and talking to single one of them is crucial in understanding and aligning everyone
Acceptable, universal artefact and deliverable: We wanted to make sure that anything that we offer in the end should be in a universal format of an artefact, and understandable not only by UX or product, but also business

Service blueprinting

After the workshop series, we worked internally on our Service Blueprint. We spent 2-3 weeks on this while validating with the broader team in between, before finally presenting the deliverable.

What we did

Alignment and context-building

First, we did a series of meetings and async communication with the US team to understand the current state and what they’re after.

Their problem is that they are not sure how to take the product forward
They want to know if there is a way we can discover opportunities while also examining current products’ shortcomings

Internal planning and audit

From the Case Study: Our internal audit of Plus

Based on the initial information, our team did an internal audit and also planning for next steps. We suggested to do a series of workshop with an output that can be used as a “playbook” for designing future Plus product: a service blueprint.

Kickoff and workshop series

From the Case Study: Stakeholder workshop (1 of many!)

We fought for buy-in for the workshop and deliverable, and when we got that, we immediately got into work.

We organized a Core Product/UX/Eng + Innovation (Singapore) team + Wider Team kickoff
We ran a series of workshops over a few weeks on different stakeholders to assess each team’s perception, needs, wants and vision for Plus

Service blueprinting

After the workshop series, we worked internally on our Service Blueprint. We spent 2-3 weeks on this while validating with the broader team in between, before finally presenting the deliverable.

From the Case Study: Final Service Blueprint

Key Recommendations

Based on auditing the MVP, we came up with the following recommendations:

Tripadvisor Plus currently lacks substance in its communication to the potential customers on the values, so we suggest reworking on the value proposition messaging
Tripadvisor Plus needs a better offering to offer more values to its customers, e.g. more substantial savings, so we need to work org-wide to make sure this is delivered

Outcomes

Estimated annual revenue of $1B

Estimated annual revenue of $1B post-audit and alignment, and spearheading of Service Blueprint.

Outputs include, but not limited to:

Unifying service blueprint, used by product, eng, and marketing teams alike to understand service touchpoints
Product vision recommendations based on the blueprint
Adhoc product and marketing design support for immediate projects

Informing better decisions

Initial workshops that led to the blueprint gathered teams cross-functionally

This allowed outcomes that included:

Deep and wide understanding of what we envision Plus should be, across teams
Commitment in what next steps should be — which was to give significant value offering over the regular Tripadvisor platform