Overview

Portal redesign to improve self-service functionalities for mass-market travel agencies.

Role

UX Team Lead & Sprint Facilitator. I led the design sprint for the next version of Amadeus' B2B Travel portal. My role: align international stakeholders, establish a validated UX framework, and enable rapid prototyping and user testing. The team included designers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders from Amadeus.

Timeline

2016 - 3 days sprint

Goal & challenge

Amadeus's goal was to self-service a regulated and scalable network which would not bottleneck access for 40,000 customers globally.
Another goal was modernizing the Mass Market travel agency portal and enhancing the speed of onboarding new products.

Create a portal to enable seamless commercial ordering, billing, user management, training, and support, while following Amadeus' digital transformation and multi-market joint-venture strategy.

The main challenge: rapid alignment and resolution of user pain points, goals, and core UX elements for quick development among scattered cross-regional stakeholders.

What I did

Structured the sprint: designed each day's activities, pre-assigned working groups, and planned workshop outcomes. Guided the team to synthesize insights on target users rather than diverge into tangents. Engaged stakeholders on scope and technical feasibility — keeping alignment without stalling momentum. Moderated design activities toward strategic outcomes, balancing facilitation with hands-on execution.

Discovery & Research

We began with customer interviews and primary research to understand travel agency workflows. Shared personas and vision documents kept the team aligned throughout, reducing friction and enabling faster iteration.

Strategy Definition

We shifted focus to "How Might We" questions and ran rapid ideation rounds with live demos. Pain points and opportunities for mass-market travel agencies surfaced quickly — prioritization emerged from the group, not imposed from above.

Design Definition

We established core principles: simplify user journeys, ensure multilingual support, and design for mobile and desktop. Content strategy and information architecture followed — grounded in how agents actually work, not how we assumed they worked.

Design Execution

We delivered a product vision and validated wireframes for the key journey: agent booking → product configuration. Ready for testing and engineering handoff.

Results

→ Alignment on user pain points and strategic direction within 3 days — the team left with clear momentum. → Validated wireframes and templates accelerated the move from discovery to detailed design and user testing. → Multi-stakeholder buy-in arrived faster than expected, cutting through typical validation delays.

Credits

- Amadeus collaborators from different countries (Distribution Product Management, Design, Distribution Marketing, NECSE Region, Distribution Marketing).

- Bakelite colleagues who helped with the facilitation and with the sprint synthesis.