Amadeus design sprint case study

UX design sprint accelerates digital product development

When Amadeus, the leading IT solution supplier to the global travel industry, was looking to rapidly take a new business concept to market, we created and facilitated a design sprint to get them off to a flying start.

Challenge

It’s critical for large organisations to be able to explore the viability and commercial potential of new ideas and opportunities. To enable Amadeus to do this, we were commissioned to create and facilitate a design sprint at the Amadeus R&D centre in France.

What we did

We ran the Amadeus design sprint as follows:

Day 1: Map
On the first day we mapped out the challenge and our objectives, and shared insights from across the business. Then we used ideation techniques to tease out key opportunities and challenges.
“The ideation was so powerful… we created a lot of ideas,” says Isabelle Villevieille, Manager – User Experience Research, Amadeus.

Day 2: Sketch
On Day 2 core design principles were considered, and we used sketching techniques and ideation development to flesh-out potential approaches.

Day 3: Decide
Day 3 was about agreeing and committing to the best way forward. Once decided, we created a storyboard, discussed customer scenarios, and created the prototype plan.

Day 4: Prototype
We worked on the prototype screen designs, culminating in a screen demo and roadmap presentation attended by senior managers. Then we began preparatory work for user testing.

Stage 5: User testing
Due to the need on this project to recruit participants from across Europe, it was not feasible to run the user testing on the fifth day. After a short gap to allow for recruitment, we completed the user testing.

Benefits

One of the key challenges in running a design sprint is to keep the participants engaged and productive throughout, and our facilitation ensured that this was the case for Amadeus.

Our client Isabelle Villevieille says, “When you ask people to be disruptive, very often they are not. But if you introduce them to unexpected approaches… you generate really new ideas.”

Asked how she felt at the conclusion of the design sprint, Isabelle says, “In the end I was so happy and felt that the outcome was so good.”