TravelBoss App

TravelBoss for Business Travel

WHAT IS TRAVELBOSS?

TravelBoss is an app created with the goal to alleviate the pain of planning and booking business travel for frequent travelers with overloaded schedules and little time to search through all the potential travel options.

 

PROJECT BACKGROUND

I was brought on when a very rough prototype had been built. My primary role was to provide UX guidance, kick-start user research, design the product, and lean on my product building experience to quickly get TravelBoss from prototype to Beta and eventually launch. Being an early stage start-up, my secondary role was helping everyone in any other way I can.

 

GOALS

Primary

  • Get to know business travelers. I needed to start talking with these people to understand their pain points, motivations and discover how TravelBoss can fit into their day by filling a need or needs that aren’t being met by their current means of planning and booking business travel.
  • Create some in-depth surveys. I wanted to get some quantitative data to aid in the development of some rough personas we could use to focus some of our decision making processes as we moved further into the design phase.

Secondary

  • Create some rough personas. As mentioned above this would help with decision making as we start creating concepts to test.
  • Start concepting once some design priorities are in place. Take the initial concept of the prototype and flush out a better way to help business travelers plan and book their business trips based on the research we had conducted.

 

PROCESS

Even though we knew the prototype had all kinds of issues, I thought it would be good to start by conducting some live user testing with business travelers to get an idea of where we were at from an idea standpoint as well as keeping an open eye/ear for any pearls of insight that might come up during the testing period. Luckily, the team had a list of 40 or so business travelers we could start to lean on for these initial sessions.

At the same time, I also created a baseline survey to learn more about pain points and motivations of business travelers and have a pool of users for additional rounds of testing. The results of this survey spawned another survey focused on specific travel preferences. I also squeezed in a round of observing them book travel the way they currently do to get an idea for the headaches and opportunities we might discover from observing them. I wanted to make sure we had both quantitative and qualitative data so we could feel comfortable on which direction to go and aid concept iterations and help in developing some guiding design priorities. We would continue this process of ideate, wireframe, user testing of rough prototypes until we landed on an implementation that was resonating with potential users all the while trying to remain agile by developing pieces the prototype that were working and tweaking pieces that needed more adjustments.

 

DESIGN PRIORITIES
  • Make the decision making process all viewable on a single page. Seeing all the various browser windows they had open with decisions they had to make along the way led us to make this a key component of the TravelBoss experience.
  • Suggestions are a good thing, but make it easy to understand why we suggest an option. If we are to get everything on a single page, we should continue to suggest the best options for them based on their preferences, meeting locations and times, arrival and departure option available, and quality of hotel. For these we could lean heavily on our travel preference survey and user interviews.
  • Determine how deep we should go with preference setting at the onboarding stage. We wanted to make get them from start to booked as quick as possible.

 

SOLUTION

Through the use of surveys, user interviews, low to high fidelity prototype testing, and live user testing we were able to create a product that could greatly reduce time spent planning/booking business travel by helping the user narrow down choice based on what we know about their schedule, meeting location and preferences all in a single page customizable “itinerary” style view of their business trip. We provided up to 4 options for flights and hotels with options to arrive/leave the day before/of meeting(s) in case our suggestions didn’t meet your specific preference for that trip.

 

MY ROLE
  • Led team in all design, UX and research initiatives
  • Conducted discovery interviews with potential users
  • Created surveys and summarized results
  • Prototype testing with users (Wires, High fidelity, and live) and summarize results
  • UI/UX design

 

RESULTS

Still in Pre-GA/Beta

 

SCREENS