How Amadeus uses a freeform and structured approach to improve the travel experience

When you’re responsible for building digital solutions used by millions, creativity and structure are two sides of the same coin. That’s what Alice Boissonnat, Principal UX Designer at Amadeus, believes  and has sought to nurture over the past couple of years.

Amadeus is a leading travel technology company that helps businesses and consumers connect to  the travel ecosystem. It builds solutions to help airlines and airports, hotels and railways, search engines, travel agencies, tour operators and other travel players run their operations and improve the travel experience, billions of times a year, all over the world.

Since she joined Amadeus a few years back, Alice has been working on a project - called Traveler ID -  that digitalizes and verifies travel documents ahead of travel, saving passengers time at the airport. The project - which involves about 50 experts from UX, sales, product management and engineering, across three continents - is part of Nexwave, the Amadeus business incubator and accelerator.  Nexwave identifies and grows business ideas that will have a transformational impact on the travel experience of today and tomorrow. It requires creativity, and organisation.

“Being a designer means having moments of bliss, of reflection, of escape, of freedom to find innovative ideas that solve users' problems,” says Alice. “But it also means involving collaborators, listening, and transforming a very uncertain concept into a concrete and validated solution, making it structured and detailed.”

Alice describes these two concepts as freeform and structured design. And she believes they should co-exist in the design process, with freeform encouraging the emergence of ideas, and structured design focused on rigour, precision and delivery.

Figma and FigJam are crucial to both concepts. So, how do they do it?

Creating a more open design process

Various teams in Amadeus started using Figma and, more recently, FigJam because they identified a need to adapt the way they work to find a more accessible and open design process. The previous tool they were using made it tricky to collaborate with stakeholders in product management, development, and the product owner in the discovery phase, and they needed a way to optimise both asynchronous and synchronous feedback.

“We need to bring stakeholders, clients and the team together, but it’s not easy to always meet in the same room, and co-create with a physical whiteboard,” says David Trastour, Head of product at Amadeus Traveler ID. “Figma helps us build products, but FigJam provides a more welcoming environment. It’s more accessible, and open to all so everyone feels comfortable and involved. Plus, it provides a touch of fun.”

David says that sense of freedom is critical to the creative process, particularly in the concept phases, and that’s where the freeform design approach comes in.

How FigJam supports “unbounded creativity”

One of the problems with having everything structured, and everything adhering to a design system, is that the pace of innovation can be slow. “Design systems are absolutely critical, of course, but sometimes they can hold back creativity,” says Alice.

That’s why the freeform approach is becoming more important at Amadeus. In this environment, there is only one rule - be open to feedback.

“When talking with the different UX teams in Amadeus, we realised that each user’s problem is unique, there is no formal design process to follow, no rules,” says Alice. “We adapt based on conversations with users, customers and product, design and engineering teams. And at this point, estimating or following a design system can be limiting."

Alice’s team find the combination of FigJam and Figma supports unbounded creativity. “In FigJam, we may use a simple diagram, maybe some rectangles or anything that represents our idea, which is great for non-designers. And Figma’s more advanced features allow product designers with more experience to scale creativity.”

“If we need to detach a component to push the limits, use the eyedropper tool instead of a colour variable...or draw on a sheet of paper, and integrate it as an illustration. So be it.”

As part of the process, Alice has been experimenting with a “Diverge” area on FigJam files so collaborators have easy access to the evolution of everyone’s thinking. Once everyone has riffed on their own ideas, they converge and iterate together on a solution. And since team members are in multiple countries and time zones, async feedback is a critical part of the process.

Team members use voice memos or Loom videos, although Comments and sticky notes are the predominant form of communication, and to add clarity the team uses a system to classify the feedback. Sticky notes are labelled with “I want to know”, “Good to know”, “Research question”, “Pros” and “Cons”, so recipients are clear about the importance, relevance and urgency of the comment.

“Having a more freeform approach, which doesn’t rely on the design system and doesn’t necessarily respect all the rules, has fast-tracked concepts, and a feedback mechanism keeps everyone aligned,” says Alice. “Using FigJam and Figma helps us to halve the number of iterations in the ideation phase.”

Creating a single source of truth in Figma

Of course, when the concept is near final, the time has come to add more structure to things.

“It's like having the plans for a house, with an approved permit,” says Alice. “When the time comes to build the house, you have to respect the structural rules, otherwise the house will fall apart.”

In Figma, product files are structured by version, and are considered as the "source of truth".

“The structure of these files should be as close as possible to how developers will use them, mainly through the use of our design system - The Amadeus Design Factory - while ensuring they use the same architecture and naming conventions, from the design tokens to the more structured components,” says Alice.

“Thanks to the power of Figma, we went beyond the components of the design system by practicing atomic design to the extreme: from the design token to the template and page, everything is a component. Each screen of our product file is a main component, and all its representations, whether to illustrate user flows, prototypes, marketing presentations - are instances.”

This organisation requires a lot of rigour, because from the token to the page, nothing must be detached, but once adopted and understood, the team found it saved an incredible amount of time. Alice estimates that “Figma helped the team become 10 times faster when modifying designs.”

One of the reasons is that before using Figma, designers spent hours trying to avoid overriding each other's work. “With Figma, our day-to-day is becoming more peaceful,” adds Maeva Cecchi, UX designer for Amadeus Discover, another project of the Amadeus Nexwave portfolio. “Our international team is working ‘side by side’ on the same screen with powerful components, comments, and smooth online files.”

Ideating three times faster

Alice says that the approach to freeform and structured design is paying off. In the discovery phase there’s more collaboration and faster alignment. “Thanks to our internal tool, we realised that with the help of Figma and FigJam, ideation is three times faster. Iterations are also shorter (2 days) and less frequent (2 on average),” she says.

On the specification side, Alice’s team make changes to HiFi designs and estimate they go 10 times faster with the 100% component structured approach. Modifications on user flows, prototypes and marketing materials are done in no more than 1 minute.

But, ultimately, one of the best ways to judge the impact of a new tool is to ask those who use it. “We ran an internal survey and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of the first Figma users was close to 100, well above other comparable tools used at Amadeus,” says Alice.