Corporate Travel Insights Application
Disrupting the airline industry with modern solutions
to acquiring and analyzing travel data
Challenge
Solve for very complex, established industry problems without being able to view any existing software solutions for legal reasons.
- My Role: Lead Designer
- My Team: 4 Product Managers, 15 Engineers
- Client: Airline Data & Analytics Company
- Business Goal: MVP to Market, ASAP
- Duration: 8 Months+ (In Progress)
Project Kick-off: Workshop
We started by abstracting industry knowledge from the client. In learning how it works today, we were able to construct a high-level workflow map to help us visualize the systems at play. From here, we were able to distill smaller pieces of the workflow and the key personas in each.
Pain Points Identified
- Impossible to see timely insights for corporation performance due to data lags of several months
- Cumbersome process around data permissions - need a cleaner and faster way to access travel data
- Lack of control over own administrative tasks - unable to manage own users, data, etc without other entities needing to intervene
- Limitations of current solution spur complex workarounds outside the system; Complicated spreadsheets needed for analysis
- Collaboration on corporation contracts messy and disorganized due to no single “source of truth”
User Research
While we did not have the opportunity to observe airlines using their current solution for legal reasons, we did have end users we could present our own concepts to for validation. Depending on the need, this took the form of:
- Interviews and guided discussion on specific topics
- Mock-ups of hypothetical solutions to determine if they fit the mental model
- Invision prototypes to visualize end-to-end flows
UI Design
Ultimate UI goals boiled down to speed of insight. We aimed to create a modern visual design which was clean and easy to read. We focused on creating dashboards that summarized the most important information for the user, intended as jumping off points for deeper analysis.
Results
- Client trust in our team has grown exponentially through the engagement. At the very beginning, the client preferred to be the face of the project to the airlines, but as our teams have integrated and we’ve shown our competence, we are now trusted to lead discovery sessions and demo the product to new airlines.
- The UX/UI work to date has been well received, with the UI components and patterns posed to inform the client’s overall visual brand and style guide as they work on creating consistency among their product portfolio.
- At the time of writing, this is one of my employer’s highest grossing projects, and is expected to bring in sustained revenue for the foreseeable future. I believe the quality of the team’s output drives this bottomline.