Research · UX Design
Helping analysts find & stop fraud faster
Introduction
As one of the largest travel sites in the world, Expedia stands to lose 900 million dollars every year on fake and fraudulent car, hotel, and flight bookings. Expedia's fraud analysts needed a better way to efficiently and accurately make decisions on potentially fraudulent bookings.
As the project lead and senior UX designer, I led the effort to redesign and evolve Expedia's fraud analysis platform — empowering analysts by creating a more visual way to spot, review, and stop potentially fraudulent bookings.
Heuristic and expert review of the exsiting analysis platform
Discovery
Getting to the root of the problem
The UX analysis revealed the existing interface was outdated, didn't meet accessibility guidelines, and subjected analysts to extremely long pages full of dense tables, tiny icons, and inconsistent affordances and calls to action for critical actions.
Going into the project there were several key questions and assumptions I had about “fraud analysts” and what that might mean. I assumed highly automated systems with little human involvement. What really surprised me was how manual the process was at times and how much pressure analysts were under to hit their review quotas in a limited amount of time and the amount of expertise and almost instinct that was required to make a final determination...
Standard, not standardized
Every booking is different, and while analysts can't follow a step-by-step checklist, we discovered there is a standard set of actions taken in different orders depending on the situation that all analysts generally take when investigating a possible fraudulent booking.
Cumbersome documentation
In addition to creating a visualization that presented essential data, there were two other things to keep in mind — improving the overall hierarchy within the interface while also ensuring actions, information, and critical details about the bookings were consistent.
Design
Consistent hierarchy and the right visuals
Ultimately we landed on a refined network diagram that visually presented connections between crucial data points. Analysts could zoom in and out to view links at different levels of detail and click to view specific information in context, no longer needing to scroll through endless nested tables. Analysts were thrilled with the new design and excited for the dev team to build it.
Faster decisions & clearer controls
Together, the new and improved link analysis "snapshot" and the newly designed visual link analysis presented mission-critical data to analysts in a glanceable, easy-to-digest format. Suppose something looked off in the link analysis snapshot. Analysts could quickly jump into the visual link analysis — using the full visualization to hone in on the relevant details worth investigating further.
Helping analysts focus on the correct information at the right time was a stated goal from the start. Facing a literal countdown clock for each booking, analysts needed to "solve" the case in a specific time frame to ensure Expedia could recoup their money. Analysts also had targets for the number of cases to review each shift — further increasing the need for efficient decision making.
We prioritized critical "one-click" actions so that analysts could easily access the external tools necessary to quickly determine whether a potentially fraudulent book was, in fact, fake.
Gone was the perpetual hunt across the interface for the tiny icon that opened the external tool they needed. Better yet, analysts didn't need to start each review by opening all their external tools in a separate window. Now analysts were presented with consistent icons to quickly access the tools required to decide on the booking in question.
Key Takeaways
This project was one instance where concerns about excessive scrolling and too many clicks were warranted. Analysts were scrolling miles and clicking hundreds of times to get the information they needed. All while working against a countdown clock. By employing more single click interactions throughout the interface and re-prioritizing, the information analysts were after in the order they needed it — we streamlined the interface and matched it more closely to how analysts were working.
The addition of the visual link analysis provided a new, graphical display of important data — and while not without some serious iteration, it was a massive improvement over the nested table view analysts were subjected to use to figure out what was going on.
After this engagement, Expedia took the designs and continued to work on the underlying data modeling and initial development work necessary to support the new and improved visual analysis tool.