My role: Design Thinking, Strategy, and Research
This company sends employees around the world, but did not have a central travel hub for travelers to manage their needs. By balancing both business needs and traveler needs, we arrived at a concept for a central travel hub that sought to meet both.
The task was to design an end-to-end experience for managing employee traveler needs. The biggest challenge was that the primary business stakeholder was most concerned with ensuring policy compliance for international travelers. The persistent ask was to restrict knowledge and options so that a backend system to determine each traveler's path.
We conducted one-on-one traveler interviews to understand their needs and motivations. What we learned was that the number one pain point for travelers was the lack of clarity about complex processes like international travel. They needed more knowledge, not less.
Stakeholders were convinced that giving travelers more knowledge and freedom would increase non-compliance. We developed a concept that gave knowledge in the right areas and reduced the chances of confusion.
For those traveling internationally, in-progress trip tasks would be surfaced on the front page. A brand new destination guide would give the policy requirements for every destination.
There was no directory of information for any of the traveled locations. A new destination guide would catalog every location and necessary information -- policies, where to stay, contact info, etc.
To remove a large portion of guesswork, the proposal was to integrate more travel-related data into the project time tracking system, so that simply entering the project code would bring up the necessary travel steps.
Balance business need with user need.
Many designers believe that our job is solely to advocate for the user, but incentives and decisions lie with the business, so we must learn to navigate the whole context.
