Story 1 - “Book” to “Select”

Here's a story based on feedback from a user research session in Japan. During a study of booking behaviors, we found that users often hesitated on the flight price selection page, unsure about moving to the next step. When asked why, they explained that they thought clicking the 'Book' button would immediately take them to payment. Given the high cost of flights, they wanted to be extra cautious. Our local team raised this issue with the product manager, aiming to solve the problem. And here's what happened next:

When the product team shared their requirements with UED, they suggested a complicated solution involving a progress bar at the top of the pages to show users how far along they were. While this could solve the issue, it made things more complex than necessary. As the Design Lead, I spoke with the product team to understand the original need and focused on solving the problem in a simpler way.

After understanding the issues faced by the Japanese team and Peter's original request, I reached out to the QA team for feedback on the Japanese wording. Then we decided to simply change the button text from “Book” to “Select”. We did A/B test on JP market first, then pushed to all markets.

Story 2 - Drop name wrong call ratio

When booking international flights, users are required to use their English names due to airline system limitations. However, in Japan and Korea, people rarely use their English names in daily life, which has led to frequent errors when entering names. This has been a persistent issue in both markets. We've previously implemented various reminder designs to help with name entry. Here’s some feedback from the Japan and Korea markets:

When we received the request, my first focus was not on redesigning the page but on whether the current wording was effectively reaching users. Since Trip has always depended on the content team to translate English into local languages, both the product team and designers have rarely checked the accuracy of these translations. We decided to thoroughly review the local language expressions and proposed the following solution, which had a clear positive impact once implemented.

Learning

Regarding the optimization requests from the PM, it's important not to rush into providing design drafts based solely on the PM's ideas. Instead, it's necessary to understand the original requirements and specific reasons behind them to achieve the most effective results with less effort.