UX STRAT Interview: Camille Le Roux, Amadeus

Paul: Hi Camille, thanks for taking time out to talk with me today about UX Strategy. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your current role, your company, how you got there?

Camille: Sure. I’m leading a UX team at Amadeus. It’s a 20-person team right now, and the team is based in five different locations in Europe and America. So, it’s a global, multi-cultural team with eight different nationalities. We do design, research, strategy and innovation. I have an engineering background, combined with years of passion for art, design and psychology. So, I migrated from science and art to UX, and I’m now adding a business and strategy dimension, working closely with our business and marketing colleagues. I enjoy being at the crossroads of science, psychology, art, and business, and I think a little bit of each of these are really useful ingredients for working in Experience Design.

Paul: Yeah, that makes sense. Tell us a little about Amadeus. You’re involved in the behind-the-scenes travel industry?

Camille: Exactly. From hotels, airlines, railways, bus and taxi companies, insurance companies, travel agencies, airports... there are multiple players involved in the travel experience. Our customers are all of these different travel actors, and Amadeus provides a GDS, a Global Distribution System. It’s where all the reservations are processed and stored. But we also provide applications and services on top of that, to many travel industry players.

Paul: You were saying that in your role you’re able to combine business, plus engineering, plus design?

Camille: Exactly. Probably like many UX teams, we started many years ago as just doing UI design, and we migrated from there to elaborating a more holistic UX approach with a lot of research and user testing. And now, again, we are migrating towards a more strategic approach with UX strategy principles applied to everything we do. So, I think it’s a progression that’s pretty natural, but now it’s becoming embedded in everything we do.

Paul: What will be speaking about at UX STRAT Europe?

Camille: If you think about the travel industry, it’s pretty complex. You have so many actors, so many touch points, so many steps. And there are also a lot of disruptions and uncertainties. For example, your flight might be cancelled, or you might miss your train, or your hotel room might not be what you expected when you booked it.

To improve the travel experience, there are a lot of things we can do. But to do that, we need to zoom out, and look at the big picture, the travel experience continuum. Look at all the different touch points and experiences from the traveler perspective, but also from our customer’s perspective, the direct users of our products. I will share the methodology I have put in place to address this complexity, and I will show how we can put everything in order and get a consistent strategy. Without looking at individual products, but rather look at the entire ecosystem, and the holistic experience from the traveler perspective.

I will talk, as well, about professional applications, because we’re building for B2B, we’re building enterprise applications. We have different KPIs than when we build consumer applications. But at the end of the day, we’re targeting human beings who have needs and expectations, and who themselves have the objective of providing a good experience to their own customers, the traveler.

Paul: My impression is that Amadeus is a traditional software engineering company, and yet you’ve been able to have a big impact. How did that come about that you were able to have influence and resources and permission to develop a more strategic design approach, rather than just executing the design of products that engineers and product managers conceived? How did you manage that?

Camille: It was a step-by-step process. It didn’t happen in one day. It’s been years, and we’ve done a lot of education around UX in our company, because as you mentioned, it’s a really engineering-focused company. And I think having an engineering background helped me learn how to educate people at some point. As I mentioned, we started just with UI design, and then we started migrating from creating “pretty mockups” into building experiences. Making something that works and that actually provides a good experience to our users, that adds value to the products and to the travelers experience itself.

Step-by-step, by using data, using facts, using customer feedback and using proof from our user discovery sessions and our research sessions, we managed to convince, one-by-one, the different actors, customers and colleagues in our company. We’re still far away from the top level of the UX maturity model, but we’re getting there. We’re starting to get support from senior management and executives. We’re doing lots of events and trainings and communications around what we do, and I think that’s key to shift mentalities.

Paul: Yeah, that makes sense. So, as you look a little bit further down the road, a lot of technologies are changing now beyond just mobile and websites. There’s a lot of new kinds of things that people are talking about. Which ones do you think will impact your particular situation the most?

Camille: It’s an exciting journey ahead. There’s a paradigm shift right now. I think I can see two evolutions in the short term. The first evolution I see is a change of how we work, so a change of methodology from user experience to customer experience. To embrace a broader perspective. And I see a shift as well, in technology and design, that will greatly impact the role of today’s UX designers. Designers have to renew themselves and constantly learn about new paradigms. We’re coming into a space where “UX designer” does not mean a lot anymore; new jobs are emerging, such AI design specialists or virtual interaction designers. Designers who will work on connecting the physical and digital worlds. And the importance of design strategy will grow as we will have to understand and model increasingly complex systems. And it’s going to spread out to a much bigger picture in every industry, especially in the travel industry. So, the environment is going to be much more disruptive, much more volatile and complex.

Paul: A lot of people in your position in Europe have difficulty getting a seat at the table, to be able to influence strategy for the products and ecosystems they work on. In other words, not just improving the design, but also being able to say, “Here’s a vision of where this overall experience should be going.” Do you think that you’ve been able to get a seat at that table?

Camille: We’re a transversal team in Amadeus, working with different businesses, as I mentioned, such as hotels, railways, airports. The level of maturity is not the same everywhere. Depending on who our point of contact is and how they envision the importance of UX in their area, and how sensitive our customers are on the topic, we have more or less the ability to change things and work on the strategic vision hand in hand with the business. For example, in Amadeus Hospitality we’re starting now to get a really close relationship with the key decision-makers. We’re hiring more and more, especially in the United States. Not just designers and researchers, but also strategists, people with a UX background, who will actually go and influence the strategy and the innovation of the products. So, it’s becoming more and more mature.

Now, how do we do that? I think it’s really a step-by-step approach. It’s really just about convincing the right persons, by showing tangible facts on the return on investment of what we do. Then it’s just a matter of the company itself, progressively moving towards this vision. And it’s not just the job of the designers. It’s also the job of everybody, and that’s also a point I make every time we talk here to our colleagues. UX design is a collaborative effort. When we define a vision, when we go out in the field and do research, and we design and think about innovation, it’s not an isolated activity. It needs to be done with R&D, business, marketing specialists, strategists… And these people, when they are part of that process, and when they see its value, it’s much easier for them to then adopt it and make it their own.

Paul: UX STRAT events focus on strategy, and data plays a large role in strategy. Yet in Europe there seems to be a very broad range of companies that are only doing execution-focused design vs. companies who are doing what you’re doing, which is using strategy to find the most intelligent way forward. Do you have any thoughts about what it’s going to take to move UX Strategy forward in Europe?

Camille: I think it’s events like your conference, UX STRAT, that I’m strongly promoting here in Amadeus; which is all about sharing facts and data and success stories and case studies… I see more and more interest in this, so I would say it’s going to come naturally, but it’s a matter of communication. Inside our company, we’re communicating all the time to show what we do. Internally, we do posters, videos, workshops, conferences and everything. I think we have to do this to promote the vision and the entire profession. So yeah, I will say we’re on the right path.

Paul: Is there anything else you wanted to tell our readers before we sign off?

Camille: I’d like to tell everybody to register for UX STRAT, because it’s an awesome conference. I went there last year and I learned so much. It was really inspiring and eye-opening; it is helping me now in my presentations at Amadeus to get people engaged in this topic. So really, thank you, Paul, for organizing this. I’m very honored to be one of the speakers this year.

Paul: The honor is mine. Thank you very much for your time, and see you in Amsterdam in a few weeks!