Building UX capability at an ASX listed company so they can compete globally
The client
Serko, an ASX listed technology company that exists to simplify the complex world of corporate travel management, operating globally through their Booking.com for Business partnership.
Opportunity
The problem they wanted to solve
Serko’s existing product had won real market share, but staying ahead meant building an entirely new flagship product, Zeno, with a genuinely better customer experience, and Serko had no in-house design capability to build it with. The immediate problem was getting Zeno’s first release right. The larger problem that we convinced Serko to focus on, was that they would keep needing this capability long after the first release shipped, so the work had to build something that outlasted any one project.
Approach
Diagnosing and designing one good release is challenging enough. The harder, more useful problem is leaving behind an organisation that can keep doing it without you, so we treated capability building as part of the deliverable from day one, not an afterthought once the product was live.
We started with in-context research to understand Zeno’s target customers and test early concepts, which shaped the first release. Because Serko had no internal design function and was new to UX research and design, we embedded a senior UX specialist directly inside the Zeno team, building design thinking and design maturity into the organisation as the product got built, rather than handing over research findings and walking away. After launch, as Serko moved into subsequent releases, we helped operationalise design properly and began building a design system to drive consistency and efficiency in future releases. As Zeno grew, we kept extending the same approach: design leadership, support with recruitment, and additional design and engineering capability, so the UX function could keep growing under its own steam.
Outcomes
Serko now runs UX as an itegrated part of its product development process rather than something bolted on for one release, with an established design system to support it. The UX team has grown from zero to multiple UX designers, researchers and engineers across the world, which is the real measure of whether the capability building actually worked.
