The UX team's cross-functional partners in product and engineering wanted to move quickly. They wanted to boost sales of the new products and didn't want to take time for user research. But I knew that this was the first time that the search widget had been scrutinized by a proper UX team. If the team was going to design an effective solution, we needed to better understand the problem we were trying to solve. I ensured that we followed the right product development process, right from the get-go, by bringing in our user researcher to conduct usability studies and competitive research to get us started on the right path.
Our research phase proved to be invaluable. In head-to-head matchups, users only preferred our search widget between 10-20% of the time vs competitors like Expedia,
Booking.com, Google Travel, and others. Here are some of the reasons: