Jon Sandruck

As Customer Experience Strategist for Sabre Travel Network, my role was to imagine the future of our product portfolio. One of the proposals I created was a travel agency Point of Sale (POS) called BLKBRD.

Through my involvement in Sabre Red 360, I uncovered specific challenges that we couldn't resolve immediately due to over 30 years of compounding technical decisions. These challenges were affecting performance, adoption, and development costs.

To inform my proposal, I performed on-site research in the US, Canada, Argentina, and Australia. I conducted contextual inquiries in retail and corporate travel agencies. I facilitated Design Thinking workshops with traditional travel agencies, airlines, online travel agencies (OTAs), and startups.

From this research, I drew vital insights into the needs and behaviors of four key groups: Suppliers (airlines, hoteliers), Travel Agencies (traditional and online), Travel Agents (retail and corporate), and Travelers (business and personal).

The BLKBRD proposal unifies the workflows of different reservation systems by making booking a flight more like booking a hotel room. The new workflow creates opportunities to improve Air Shopping performance by relying on the much faster Schedule and Availability systems. It also builds-in opportunities for airlines to merchandise their offerings by creating single-carrier screens. On those screens, carriers would be able to control specific graphical elements and place advertisements.

One of those single-carrier screens is a Fares screen, which exposes the different fare attributes applicable to a single flight. This screen allows agents to book specific fares based on their attributes, without needing to memorize fare rules and classes of service.

For OTAs and Startups, switching from a single monolithic Shopping API to a combination of Schedule/Availability/Fares APIs improves performance by removing the need to process pricing requests from the GDS, and creating smaller payloads. It also creates opportunities for personalization, which benefits airlines and agencies.

Although BLKBRD is a long term vision and not created for immediate development, it has been valuable. Sabre received several New Direct Connect (NDC) certifications based partially on the proposed design.

Sabre Red Workspace is an agency Point of Sale (POS), and the flagship product of Sabre Travel Network (TN). In the summer of 2015, the world's largest retail travel agency challenged us to redesign it, and show them our vision of the future. They believed that poor UX was responsible for their 40% turnover in new agents. Their retention problem cost them $4 million each year.

With only eight weeks to create our proposal, we began by using internal resources to get the insight we needed. Our consulting team had spent months onsight with the client and had research we could use. We conducted Design Thinking workshops to draw insight from their experiences. Based on those insights, we worked together to create narratives of significant customer interactions. We hired an animator to help us tell the story we were developing.

When the client visited our headquarters, we made our proposal using an animated prototype and a live software demo. I facilitated a Design Thinking workshop to gather feedback. We learned about the challenges facing their business. We uncovered problems they were unaware of or had given up trying to solve.

Our proposal was a hybrid graphical/terminal interaction. It allowed agents who use the GDS terminal to access the modern tools we created. It also created an on-ramp to the power and efficiency of the terminal. We created analytical tools that made agents into instant experts. We pulled information about margins, private fares, and commissions into the agent workflow. We used behavioral economics to nudge agents into selling win-win products to customers.

Based on our proposal, the client committed to a pilot. They would convert their US and Canadian operations to our new system. If that went well, we would win their Australian business and convert 9,500 agents to the new system over 2.5 years.

Over the next nine months, we built design and development teams, designed the MVP, and delivered a working pilot. We did on-site research at their retail and corporate locations in the US and Canada. We used insights from contextual inquiry to improve our design and create new features.

Based on the success of the North American pilot, Sabre won the Australian business. However, while the business outcomes for Sabre are compelling ($1.4 Billion over ten years), the results for the client are the real validation of the design. The client was able to complete onboarding six months ahead of schedule. In the six months following the rollout, they reported an 8.7% increase in Total Transaction Value. In the first year, they reported a 23.3% increase in profits, totaling $32MM.

From a design standpoint, the main challenge of creating Sabre Dev Studio, a site that houses documentation for our new suite of REST APIs, has been determining what to make that will best serve our audience. To that end, we’ve conducted ethnographic research, performed competitive analysis, created personas, and created a site and documentation to help them.

In practice, the most challenging aspect of the project has been keeping a cross-functional team of design, technology, and marketing aligned and motivated to create the massive cultural change necessary to complete the project. Dev Studio is the first product that Sabre has tried to market outside of the travel industry, and it represents a significant shift in our thinking.

As design lead for Dev Studio, I participated in research, synthesized it into a design recommendation, socialized the design to senior leadership within Sabre Travel Network, and ultimately presented the design to Sabre Holding’s CEO.

In the course of implementing our design recommendation, I took on many lots of work outside of my role. I wrote and directed a video. I created several app prototypes that demonstrate the APIs. I worked with developers to produce those prototypes for release as SDKs. I wrote hundreds of lines of jQuery code to apply Bootstrap to an incompatible content management system. I led a team of ten designers in a two-day ‘hackathon’ to create prototypes for newly added APIs. Most importantly, I have nurtured strong interpersonal relationships with individuals outside of my team, division and business unit, which are necessary to create cultural change.

Since sometime in the 1960s travel agents have been using a Sabre terminal to book travel for their customers. Sabre® Red™ Mobile Workspace is the latest iteration of this terminal, with a few significant differences, and a few notable challenges.

Principally, it's on an iPad. Using it requires typing cryptic commands on an on-screen keyboard that takes up more than 40% of the terminal screen the user is referencing

It also carries with it user expectations that the experience will be intuitive and magical while maintaining the user's existing knowledge of terminal workflows that have been slowly evolving for over 40 years.

The challenge of designing the next generation Sabre interface has become creating highly intuitive tools to supplement, rather than replace, the existing workflow. These tools range from maps and date pickers to tools that help users learn commands, or help them build impossibly complex commands that would typically require a background in computer science to construct.

Sabre Red Mobile Workspace debuted in March at TTX, Sabre's technology conference to the most enthusiastic reaction of any product Sabre has ever produced, leading senior leadership to remark, "This is the only time I've ever had to stop my presentation for applause."

When Sabre released it in 2013, it received 5-Star App Store reviews, which it maintained for five years. It also became the centerpiece of Sabre's efforts to create non-booking income. In its first year, it generated $400,000 of subscription revenue and proved that agencies would pay for premium tools.

There are plenty of trading apps for iOS. However, there aren't many that never require you to type to make a trade. While analyzing Trademonster's desktop software, we realized that although users could use their keyboard to execute trades, they wouldn't need to touch a keyboard at all with the introduction of a few well-designed controls.

We then set out to design a full-featured trading app that enables hardcore traders to obsessively research, monitor, and trade stocks, options, and bonds from the convenience of their favorite mobile device.

Recognizing the tendency of serious traders to check their accounts, quotes, and news compulsively, we designed the interface to be glance-able, with large, clear quotes, meaningful color-coding for indicators, and easy to read fonts with large, open counters.

We also analyzed the existing workflow of long-indoctrinated users to identify and eliminate waste in the trade flow. By consolidating the information on screens with highly redundant data, we were able to streamline the process of trading and reduce the amount of time between initiating and submitting a trade.

In 2013 Barron's Online named OptionMonster "Best for Options Traders," thanks in no small part to TradeMonster Mobile, which received a nearly perfect rating of 4.9 in their evaluation.

In 2014, as tradeMonster continued to integrate features designed by my team, they were awarded 2nd place overall in Barron's "Best Online Brokers." "A key to its continued high ranking," says Barron's, "is the firm's success in bringing desktop functionality to mobile devices."