Accessible travel articles
I created help center articles for a hotel-facing help center to educate partners on how they could create a more accessible experience for guests.
QUICK INFO
Timeline: July 2020 to December 2020
Roles: User researcher, content writer
Problem statement
According to the World Health Organization, 15% of the world’s population has a disability. Based on my research, travelers with disabilities often have inaccessible experiences when staying at hotels and vacation rentals. I aimed to find a solution that could address this issue.
Design question
How can we make the experience of staying at a hotel more accessible to travelers with disabilities and accessibility needs?
OBJECTIVES
Understand the barriers that travelers with disabilities face when they stay at a hotel
Educate hotel partners on how they can create a more accessible experience for guests
Share insights with people at Expedia Group to help them incorporate accessibility in their work
My journey
Discover/define
I completed internal user interviews and a survey with travelers with different disabilities and analyzed data to develop the problem statement and identify the issues that travelers with disabilities commonly experience. Additionally, I conducted secondary research by reviewing articles and external reviews from travelers with disabilities.
Develop
I brainstormed ways to address the issue of bad experiences that guests with disabilities encounter when staying at hotels. Our hotel help center currently didn’t include information about accessibility. I decided to move forward with educating hotels and vacation rentals through hotel-facing help articles about how to provide inclusive experiences to travelers with accessibility needs.
Using insights from my research, I drafted two articles that addressed the needs and pain points of travelers with disabilities. I shared these articles with the Ability Inclusion Movement (AIM), which is Expedia Group’s inclusion business group that has a goal to remove barriers for employees with disabilities. AIM provided valuable feedback that helped me identify gaps in the content.
Deliver
Next, I wrote and published these articles:
Results
These articles brought awareness to how inclusion and accessibility can be incorporated into work and goals. The articles were featured in Expedia Group’s 2020 Inclusion and Diversity report.
I recommended that external research be conducted with traveler with disabilities, which took place last year.
Next steps
I continue to review the content metrics for these articles to determine how they meet user needs. I’m currently conducting user research to further understand hotel partner education needs.