Happay Travel UX Revamp
Happay Travel allows corporates and its employees to easily plan, book and manage business trips in accordance to corporate's travel & expense policies
Goal
Employees in an organisation should be ready to book online trips on a self book portal for single or multiple products
Challenges in the current Eco-system
Happay’s T&E Benchmark report 2018 stated that Enterprises are still using manual or semi-automated travel and expense management solutions for managing travel expenses.
1. Awareness: Organisations are aware of the problems, but aware of how to solve it or they are aware of the product, but not motivated to buy .
2. Current Experience: Travel and expense are managed as independent process. Co-ordinating with multiple suppliers to book different products. Manual approvals and booking happen through mails.
3. Problems: Lack of one unified Travel and Expense platform. There is no single platform with complete trip management.
The Process
Step 1 - Stakeholder discussion:
Multiple discussions and mapping sessions were done with product managers, in-house travel experts to understand the solution ecosystem and scope of value being proposed from a business perspective. The sole purpose is to make a mind-map of the scope of solution and user functions that the solution will eventually encompass as it matures over upcoming years.
Step 2 - Contextual Enquiry:
Once the basic understanding of the solution ecosystem was in place we intervened to find out user perspectives. Multiple video sessions were referred from the previous implementation for further study. The primary focus was to understand how users go about completing tasks. What are the pain-points and delights if any. Another perspective is to understand the exclusive user behaviours across and within roles. The later helped us define the personas which eventually is referred down the process and helped defining role based features.
Step 3 - Competitive Study:
Competitive study is done at this stage to check trends, practices and information that we might have missed till now that can be thought of and included before moving towards defining user flows and journeys.
Step 4 - Card sorting and IA:
The structure and categorisation of content and information was done using open card-sorting sessions with 6 users from our product, sales, finance and marketing teams who were involved in frequently travelling or managing travel requests. This eventually helped us define the basic grouping or housing of information which reflected the mental model of users interviewed. Hence, the Information architecture was derived.
Step 5 - Navigation Structure
We initially proposed a side vertical navigation to accomodate frequent information groups and also to align with the other Happay products. This idea was tested with 5 users in-house in a virtual hangout session. We received multiple feedback saying that the content got too crammed in several pages and it hindered their experience in figuring out the main tasks. Based on the feedback we reworked on the navigation structure and proposed a top navigation based on the following factors:
1. It is a content-heavy portal unlike vendor/expense, so top navigation will help use more screen real-estate.
2. The navigation elements per se are limited unlike vendor /expense so we rejected vertical navigation layout.
3. Align with market patterns in the travel space who also have moved to top navigation to accommodate global access at any page.
Step 6 - User flows and lo-fi prototype:
We started chalking out the user-flows as sketches at this point. Later, we mocked the same in low fidelity prototypes to validate with stakeholders (PMs, Finance and AM team ) and test it out with users. We used Adobe XD to create complete flows.
Step 7 - Feedback:
We incorporated the changes after receiving viable feedback form the stakeholders. Then we proceeded with the high fidelity designs once everyone was on board with the final changes.
Salient Features
1. In the new platform all the travel bookings are done in the form of trips. A trip acts like a cart, where all the travel products are stored.
A. The user cannot book a single product directly, but instead create a trip and add flights, hotels and cabs all into it.
B. All the products within the trip have to be submitted for payment and/or approval together, instead of individual requests.
C. In a trip only one policy holder can be applied for single or multi-pax booking.
D. Once travellers are added to a trip, same travellers will be applied to all products within the trip.
2. Integrated solution for travel and expense.
3. Employees can book multiple products together through a complete trip management platform.
4. Single system to manage multiple suppliers.
5. Check Fares: The user can simply check fares rather than creating the entire trip. This is especially useful when the user is only fare shopping and has not decided on travel. User can book a travel in the check fare flow as well if the fares for the selected dates are acceptable to the user.
6. Once the user has reviewed the 1st product in the trip and adds a new product, the search parameters are pre-filled by our smart recommendations based on the trip details. The search is applied directly, saving time and efforts for the user.