Visa Webapp Experience | Ali Baquer

Overview

Sherpa is a startup that provides travel visas and educates travelers around global travel restrictions.
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Our company partnered with TUI Airlines to create a solution that simplifies eVisa purchases for their travel agents. I led the design and product discovery research for this project.

This case study focuses on the buying experience, though I also designed account registration, login, checkout, and post-purchase experiences.

Role:

UX | UXR

Impact:

100%

Agent satisfaction

5x

Increase in adoption

Jump to designs

User interviews

I interviewed 6 TUI Airlines travel agents, all based in the Netherlands, about their workflow and their responsibilities when dealing with a client.

Sample questions:

"Walk me through each step you take from when you first interact with a client."
"Let's do a little roleplaying. My partner and I would like to book a trip to Cairo next month. What do you have for me?"

Key insights

83% of agents mentioned the importance of group applications and buying multiple visas, which the product doesn’t currently support
Clients expect agents to arrange everything for them, including getting a visa if it’s required
Travel agents should have insight into their colleague’s clients in order to cover for them if they’re away

Understanding the problem

Travel agents from TUI Netherlands are overwhelmed and confused with sherpa’s application process and have provided this feedback to the partner success team.
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Instead of applying for visas using our product, travel agents are turning away clients to government application portals. This is a problem as it’s leading to loss in revenue for both companies.

Requirements gathering

What this solution should do:

Incentivize travel agents to purchase visas through sherpa
Create a logged in experience for travel agents
Let agents purchase visas in quantity
Enable agents to track their clients’ visa applications

What this solution should not do (yet):

For the MVP, we descoped giving travel agents visibility into their team members' clients.

User flow

I created a user flow for this new e-commerce experience. Together with a product manager and developer, we used this user flow as a brainstorming tool to discuss technical feasibility.

Prototype testing

I tested the prototype on usertesting.com with 10 users (5 mobile, 5 web). Add-to-cart tasks had a success rate of 100%, and 90% of users did not make any mistakes during the test.

View prototype

Final design

After making tweaks to the mid-fidelity prototype as well as the positive and consistent response we received from users from testing our high fidelity prototypes, we felt confident with this overall experience.

Login page

Travel agents start their experience by entering their login details.

Product page

Users can check if they need a visa, learn how the process works, and and a visa to their cart.

Add to cart modal

The agent gets notified that their visa has been added to their cart.

Outcome & Reflection

Overall, taking on this project was very fulfilling. It allowed me to sink my teeth into something completely new, talk to a brand new user group, and build from scratch. I loved getting to collaborate with the dev and PM, and thinking critically about how our users could get what they need in the simplest way.

Update: Travel agents from TUI Airlines were onboarded to the platform and even beta tested the experience!