If you know anything about the way we design at Booking.com it’s probably how much A/B testing we do. And it’s true: everything goes through an A/B test before becoming part of one of our products. What you probably don’t know is that this is only one part of the work we do to reduce uncertainty in making decisions.

With A/B testing we can test hypotheses at scale, on our global audience, and we can understand user behavior when interacting with our products. But, how can we know what’s happening “behind” this data?

This is where we come in — the user experience research community: we’re here to answer the “why” questions. Our role is to understand human behavior, the context, the goals, and make recommendations that will improve the experiences of millions of customers around the world.

How we work

We are a large and diverse community of Researchers, Research Coordinators, Interns and a Consumer Psychologist. This constantly growing community is involved across multiple departments, products, markets and user segments (both on the consumer and partner-facing sides of the business).

Most of us are based in the company headquarters in Amsterdam. This enables us to be embedded into product teams, so that we can work closely with the people that are building and making decisions about our products.

1. Research is a team sport

We typically work alongside product owners, UX designers, developers, UX copywriters, and data scientists, all of whom are invested in and understand the need for research. This collaboration ensures teams receive insights, but also develop a sense of empathy for our users.

2. Research is one step ahead

We try to anticipate and plan research that will help our stakeholders achieve their long-term goals for product success, while championing the needs of our users.

3. Research is learning from each other

Although researchers may focus on different areas of the product or business, we maintain a strong community tie. We believe that the best way to learn is from each other, whether that is through feedback, mentorship, or knowledge sharing events.

What we do

Booking.com has guests and partners in over 200 countries, and it can be challenging to conduct research at this scale. We’ve conducted research in 30 countries and counting, selecting markets based on our audience data and business strategy.

We are here to understand human behavior and we use a wide range of research methods for that. The research question always guides our approach, whether qualitative, quantitative, or a mix of methodologies. It’s our role to understand the best method given the specific goals and constraints of our stakeholders.

We have an in-house usability testing lab that we’re constantly improving to adapt to our growing research needs.

But, usability testing is not the only research method we use, we have been known to:

• Shadow travellers during their trips
• Conduct contextual interviews in guests’ homes or partners’ offices
• Follow travellers’ decision and booking journey through a diary study
• Do guerilla testing in the streets of Amsterdam or elsewhere in the world
• Run remote, unmoderated tests
• Engage users in activities on the community platform
• Co-design together with users

and much more…

What’s next

We’ve worked hard to make user experience research an essential part of the Booking.com culture, but we’re not done yet — we’re constantly learning and refining our approach and structure. We need to continually adapt to the growth of our customer base, products, teams and the emergence of new technologies.

We also want to empower our stakeholders to conduct more research themselves and continue bringing empathy to the forefront of decision-making.

Ultimately, we want our work to help stakeholders: do the right thing, for the right people, at the right time, while acknowledging the relevant context.

Does that sound like a challenge you would be excited to take on alongside us? Apply here.

Co-written by Anna Efimenko and Emeline Therias

Informed by data, driven by empathy: an introduction to user experience research at Booking.com was originally published in Booking.com — UX Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.