Understanding the problem

Through auditing the existing UX, the team set out to answer the following:

• How do Gold members come to learn about their Gift of Gold perk?

• After learning about the Gift of Gold, how do Gold members go about giving the Gift of Gold?

• What pain points and challenges does the member face while giving the Gift of Gold?

We discovered that the manual voucher redemption process was cumbersome, involving three separate forms that the member needed to submit to Contact Centre with a 4-day lead before travel. Additionally, practical information about the benefit could be accessed only through inconspicuous hyperlinks, burying it deep within Dot com.

After the audit, the team still had questions about the user journeys for both the gifting member and the recipient. They needed to know more about how members came to learn about Gift of Gold in the first place and what the recipient experience looked like. To answer these questions, the team conducted stakeholder interviews and collaborated with User Experience Research to understand how Gold and Platinum members came to learn about their tier benefits in the first place.

Some of the key takeaways from the stakeholder interview and UXR report include the following:

• Gold members learn about their Gift of Gold benefits through email campaigns, Dotcom, friends, and family.

• Users’ top frustration with the existing Gift of Gold experience is the number of steps in the flow.

• Members receiving the Gift of Gold receive an email notifying them that they have been upgraded to Gold status, but there is no further context to the email.

• Members giving the Gift of Gold receive a thank you message after submitting a voucher form for redemption to the Contact Centre but do not receive further communication.

• Members do not understand the relationship between the Gift of Gold and Milestone Awards.

Actionable Insights

• Users are learning about the Gift of Gold through email, the website, friends and family.

• Users gave the experience an average or below-average score for gifting gold. Users’ top frustrations are the number of steps required to complete this.

• On the website, some users got stuck on the gold page with a lack of understanding of the relationship between milestone awards and the gift of gold. Users are unsure about the process of completing the gift of gold vs. trade-in milestone awards.

• Users want to see this info about the gift of gold earlier in the flow.

Roadmapping, Planning & Strategy

The team brainstormed every solution and item that could make for a better user experience. We made individual tasks for each idea, sorted them by need to haves and nice to haves and prioritized tickets by impact level and effort level. Then we identified every product that will be touched by the Gift of Gold redesign.

The key actionable items decided on were:

• Create a digital voucher redemption flow in Profile. In addition to centralizing all voucher redemptions in one product, digital Gift of Gold voucher redemption eliminates the 4-day lead previously required and gives guests more flexibility in booking.

• Leverage emails to excite guests about their gift and encourage voucher recipients to book travel, increasing revenue.

• Add an element of personalization in emails to the recipient as a custom message from the gifter. Personalization creates a moment of joy and improves brand perception and loyalty.