Case study — Rapid Validation
Building the evidence base for a payments feature in three days, not weeks
Emerging Travel Group
Leadership needed proof, not just projections
Partners had long flagged slow payouts as a frustration, and a newer pricing option depended on partners trusting they'd be paid quickly enough to adopt it. Company leadership needed hard evidence — beyond financial modeling alone — that partners wanted this enough to justify prioritizing it now, on a fast timeline.
Compressing a two-week process into three days
The survey wasn't originally planned — I proposed running it myself when I saw a chance to strengthen the business case with real partner data on a tight leadership-driven deadline, rather than relying purely on financial projections. Given the urgency, I compressed a process that normally takes up to two weeks (coordinating survey distribution through the marketing team) into three days, working directly with marketing, copywriting, and product stakeholders to fast-track approvals. In parallel, six moderated interviews validated the proposed feature's flow and terminology before launch.
What partners told us about payout timing
[Visual: recommendations table — issue area, recommendation, why it matters.]
Terminology and search behavior, both fixable fast
The term used for one payment option was interpreted three different ways by different users (as a full payment, a separate payment type, or a website-only option) — a clear terminology fix.
A status label meant to indicate a completed payment was misread by a third of testers as something that would happen in the future, not something already done.
Every single tester searched for a specific booking by guest name, not by booking number — despite the interface being built around booking numbers as the primary identifier.
Fast, credible evidence — running alongside the qualitative work, not after it
The survey — which wasn't in the original plan — gave company leadership concrete, timely evidence to support prioritizing the feature, delivered on the same tight timeline the decision required. The usability recommendations were incorporated directly into the next design iteration (terminology changes, adding a guest-name column to the payments table, revising the status tooltip), running alongside the survey rather than waiting for a separate research cycle.
My manager's feedback here was fair: the survey analysis could have gone further with segmentation (e.g. by property size or booking volume) to strengthen the argument, and there was room to build and test new hypotheses directly from the open-ended responses rather than treating the survey purely as validation. Given more time, I'd have built that into the initial survey design rather than treating it as a follow-up.