Chris Cameron: UX Writing for a Travel-Planning App – Episode 11

Chris Cameron At Booking.com, they've been helping travelers with their trip planning for many years. The arrival of generative AI has given them new ways to help travelers with this business-critical task. Over the past year, Chris Cameron has applied his UX writing and content strategy skills in ways both familiar and new to help build a new AI-powered Trip Planner tool that integrates with Booking.com's travel-booking app. We talked about: his work as a principal UX writer at Booking.com on their "writing system," which is sort of like their version of a design system for UX writers his recruitment to a "tiger team" at Booking to develop a new travel-planning AI chatbot for their travel-booking app the key differences between his prior product work and his work on this AI product the new kinds of collaboration that have arisen in his work on a generative AI product, in particular his work with machine-learning engineers the transition from the prototype of the app to its current position as an established product the product-feedback mechanisms that are built into the Booking "Trip Planner" how to jump start your learning if you're new to working on generative-AI tools how they were able to leverage components in their current design system to build the new Trip Planner app the prompt engineering skills he developed by creating an AI "story robot" for his three-year-old son his optimism about the employment prospects for UX writers how traditional content strategy practices like establishing voice and tone and consistent terminology manifest in AI product design how new AI practices are just as likely to show up as enterprise productivity improvements as in customer-facing products and features Chris's bio Chris Cameron has over 13 years of professional writing experience across journalism, marketing, and UX. As a Principal UX Writer at Booking.com, Chris oversees UX Writing Systems, managing the tools and workflows that enable over 80 UX writers to efficiently create high-quality content localised into over 45 languages and dialects. Born in Boston and raised in Phoenix, Chris now lives in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Connect with Chris online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/bptOvimY4uU Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 11. As generative-AI tools are introduced into consumer products and enterprise workflows, the core work of content designers and UX writers still feels familiar, but the context for the work and many of its details are evolving. Over the past year, at Booking.com, where he has been working on an AI-powered travel-planning app, Chris Cameron has seen first-hand how the traditional concerns of content strategy and UX writing manifest in the world of generative AI. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode #11 of the Content + AI Podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Chris Cameron. Chris is a principal UX writer at Booking.com, the big travel booking agency based in Amsterdam. Welcome to the show, Chris. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Booking. Chris: Well, thanks, Larry, for having me. Yeah, I'll give a bit of my background as well. Like yourself, I started in journalism and then got into copywriting. And after moving to Amsterdam from the US at a very young age, 25, I guess, I eventually joined Booking in 2016, a little over seven years ago. And back then, the role was actually called copywriting. There was about 25 of us. And over the years we sort of discovered that we were actually UX writers, and we've become now this community of over 80 UX writers. And now, I am a principal UX writer, and the area I look after we call writing systems. And what that is is sort of like the writing version of design systems, but it's not so much a system, it's more like the tools and the workflows that we use to get our jobs done. So my role is to work on those tools and work on those workflows and make sure it's easy for our writers to get their jobs done in an efficient and easy way so they can create high quality content. And more recently, one of the areas I've been interested in looking into is GenAI and how we might use that to improve our workflows. Larry: Yeah, that's why I wanted to have you on the show. You told me about this product you developed, the Trip Planner, that's based on AI. Can you tell us a little bit about how that project arose and how you got involved with it? Chris: Yeah, definitely. So my involvement with AI and GenAI in general started when ChatGPT came out. I think a lot of people took notice back then. That was late last year, 2022. And I started playing around with it. I'm always a bit of a nerd and early adopter of technology, so I started using it for different things. I have a toddler at home, so I was actually using it to create bedtime stories for him. I would say, "Let's ask the story robot what kind of story you want to read tonight", and he would just generate a story idea, and ChatGPT would help us with the rest. It was a lot of fun. Chris: But professionally, I started thinking, "Okay, how could this be useful for our writers at Booking or how Booking as a company could use it?" And early this year, 2023, the company was seriously looking at GenAI and thinking, "Okay, what are we going to do with this?" And because I was already exploring it, I got pulled into some early discussions, and I thought, "Okay, we're going to have some brainstorms, some chats about how GenAI did," but actually the company was already like, "Let's go build a GenAI chatbot and put it in the app, and this is going to be the only thing you focus on for the next couple of months." And I'm like, "Okay, let's do it. Let's roll." Chris: And so basically, a task force was formed within the company, sometimes called a tiger team, we called it sometime, and it was representatives, multiple people from writing, design, research, product, and then also machine learning, our iOS and Android engineers, of course, data science, and marketing and legal. It was a big team. In the end, it was almost like having a little startup within the company, it was about 70 people. And the UX work stream was sort of one half of it, and the other half was all the machine learning and the engineering that was going on. Chris: And this sort of kicked off in mid-April when we started this, and two months later, we were able to launch the AI Trip Planner in June. Just so people understand what it is we built, we built basically an AI chatbot into the Booking app, and people can chat with it and ask their travel questions, and it can help them get inspiration for where to go or what hotel to stay at or build an itinerary, these sorts of things. And it integrates some of the traditional booking experience, like with carousels and images and property ratings and things like that, right into the chat so it feels a bit more natural. And then if they tap on a property, they can go straight into the booking process and make a reservation. Chris: And so a lot of it uses some of our existing machine learning knowledge we've built up at the company over the years and then relies a bit on OpenAI ChatGPT to do that generative AI piece and really create a nice conversation. So if people want to try it out, if they're in the US or they can VPN to the US, they can sign into the Booking app on iOS and Android and make sure their language is set to English, and they should see the AI Trip Planner right on the home screen. Larry: That sort of gets at some of the complexity around this, because I know you localize into 50 languages and cultures. Chris: Yeah, I think 45. Yeah. Larry: And so right now it's just English only and in the US, so that's interesting. And really, as you talk about that, I'm wondering from a user perspective, it's almost like just a UI thing. For an end user, you could almost perceive it that way. "Oh, another way to interact with this thing and do my trip planning." But on the backend, like you said, it's 70 people on this tiger team that put that together. How similar was it to other products, because as a principal you've worked on a lot of different projects probably at this scale, how much of it was familiar and similar and how much of it was new? Tell me a little bit about that. Chris: Yeah, definitely. There was a lot that was familiar to just a normal building a product, but there were some key differences. For example, for working with a GenAI product specifically, it's such a new thing that there's not a lot of existing research. So if you're going to go to your researcher and say, "Okay, what do we know about GenAI?" It's like, well, they're still learning too. So a lot of that was involved, looking at what is out there in the market, what competitors are doing, but then we were also able to combine that with the existing understanding of user needs, because essentially this is a search experience that we've been dealing with for a long time at Booking. So we know a lot about what the user's looking for in that moment when they come to the app. So those needs didn't change, but the way they were expressing those needs is the whole new thing. Chris: And in the early stages, when we were trying to test something, it's not that easy to build a GenAI prototype. If you're building a prototype in Figma, you can't really insert the AI part in there very easily. Maybe soon that will be a thing. So we had to wait until we actually had a working build of the tool where we could play with it internally, and that's when we started actually doing a lot of the understanding of, "Okay, what's working, what's not?" that sort of thing. So there was that challenge. Chris: But from a content and writing perspective,