Our Design team has 50+ members designing for 3 platforms in 25 languages while serving 160 000 + users a day. They design for our customers, employees, and partners by focusing on the shopping experience, ancillaries, self-service, engagement, customer service systems, and B2B Platforms. This team organized a Global Travel Jam for the 5th time.
What is Global Travel Jam, you might ask? Why do we organize it and who participates there? Read below to get answers to these questions and learn more about how it all started and what the event means for our mentors.
How did the Global Travel Jam start?
Recently, we talked with Martin “MJ” Jancik, Product Design Manager who mentioned that one of the first things he did at Kiwi.com was to organize a UX hackathon around travel industry topics. We call it the Global Travel Jam,” explained MJ.
“It was a weekend event where, for 24 hours, we were designing from research to the final prototype, basically from scratch. It was a lot of fun and we received a lot of positive feedback. I saw potential and when we also did it in other cities, it became an annual event. This year is our fifth anniversary and I’m pretty proud of that.
Global Travel Jam (GTJ) 2022
As we want to gather a diverse group of people, we focus on the experience and the complementarity of skills that are compared to other potential participants. Senior design experts got a chance to get their hands dirty outside of the confines of their usual 9-5, while the most promising junior talents got to rub shoulders with the top experts in the industry.
The challenge this year was about conducting a diary study, identifying key areas that need improvement and designing concrete solutions. As Ioannis, our UX Researcher and a mentor during GTJ said, the challenge itself is hectic and requires creativity and critical thinking.
“That being said, this requires good organisation of ideas and processes in a preliminary stage, so that it can run smoothly, especially in such a tight timeline,” said Ioannis.
He also mentioned that he was a mentor there for the first time and he loved it.
“Personally, this event is all about how research and design can do magic together and how interconnected both fields are. I felt more passionate about what I do and why, and reminded myself that being creative and an out-of-the-box thinker usually brings the best product solutions,” said Ioannis.
Why do we do the Global Travel Jam?
We want to show how important it is to always take research-informed design decisions to solve problems and optimize the product. We do this to connect with more people in the design community, exchange ideas, and adopt new approaches to how we design solutions in tech. This event is all about sharing experiences between designers and researchers and working together on some creative ideas; in our case working on the idea of how to improve travel experiences.
Anja Bošnjak Mihić, our Senior Product Designer who was a mentor during the Global Travel Jam, mentioned that it was an honor for her to work with a team of experts and not only share her experience with them but learn something new that can also improve her skills.
“GTJ was a creative training for all of us. It allowed us to focus on the addressed user challenges and create a process by which we came up with innovative solutions. We could come to these solutions without thinking about the limitations that we have to take into account in our daily work,” said Anja.
Svenja Pieritz, our UX Researcher, added that it’s a great opportunity for people to connect with others outside of their own organisation and get a new perspective on their own skills.
“I, myself, got my first job through a hackathon and therefore have a personal connection with those kinds of events. It’s a unique way to get a feeling for a company and its culture while getting yourself out of your comfort zone,” mentioned Svenja.
See the video from the event.
Interested in joining the UX team at Kiwi.com and being part of Global Travel Jam? Check out our open positions!