Prior to COVID-19 corporate travel was critical to many organisations standard business operations. While conducting contextual inquiries with some of our largest customers for an unrelated project we observed many of them resorting to cumbersome, expensive, and laborious manual process to track their employees who were travelling on business. CTM saw this an opportunity to explore a new product which could help monitor travellers who had booked through our platform.
User research, Quantitative research, product design, design strategy, workshop facilitation, UX design, UI Design, Usability testing
I led a large mixed method approach to research to understand the behaviours, needs and pain points with the organisations we had observed in earlier contextual inquiries. This discovery was then expanded out to other organisations accommodating different sizes, industries, and travel volumes to validate the patterns we had observed.
Some key challenges we identified from the research
Taking our findings we work shopped several prototypes for our two main personas The Traveler and the Travel Manager. We developed mid-fidelity clickable prototypes and tested them with more customers to validate our findings. The successful concepts were iterated with the business,losing some functionality due to business constraints, but keeping the MVP features required to address the key pain points.
Finally, we developed the successful wireframes into fully clickable, pixel perfect screens and interfaces to be interpreted for development by our development team. To assist with their understanding of how the screens would function, we worked in a co-designed series of agile sprints,providing user flows, IA and user stories in addition to the screen designs.This made it a lot easier to communicate the value and purpose of each function as it was added.
CTM launched Travel Tracker 1.0 in early 2020 initially as a free add on to our travel management platform. It was welcomed by the industry as a significant point of difference with CTM and its competitors. However soon after going live COVID-19 struck Australia and the travel industry ground to a halt. We took the opportunity over the next 6 months to complete additional features such as a pre-trip risk assessment, travel risk alerts and CTM Mobile integration with a view to help our customers navigate travelling during the pandemic.
