Insteract simplifies travel management by blending traveller needs and company policies. It offers a complete travel management platform for business and travellers.

Role: UX/UI design, Prototyping

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Problem

Business travel is essential for geographically distributed teams, but managing it was hard work.

Travellers were unhappy with the bookings made by agents.

Travellers spent a lot of time coordinating with the travel team to get the flights they wanted. In most cases, the team was not aware of their personal preferences and could not book flights that they liked.

Travel managers struggled to define the best travel policy.

Travel managers spent a lot of time getting the best flights and rates from agents. They struggled to define the best travel policy that worked well for both the company and the employees.

Solution

We built a complete travel platform to simplify travel management.

1) Travellers got a dependable, personalised travel assistant.

The mobile app understood the traveller's personal preferences and blended them with the travel policy to always show relevant results. They could book flights that they liked while staying within the budget.

2) Travel managers got control over the workflow

The mobile and the web app allowed them to get control over the workflow from anywhere.

Onboarding Travellers

Collecting traveller preferences upfront helped us show relevant results.

Travellers were very picky about their travel preferences

We got to know the travellers very well. Their likes, dislikes and travel preferences. We were not pesky, the short questions were easy to answer with a few taps. This helped us personalise the experience and always show relevant content.

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Flight Search

Business travellers did not want to spend time looking for the cheapest flights.

Show the best personalised results

We found that travellers spent too much time looking for the flights that matched their preferences and the company policies. We only showed flights that matched the company policy.

Shortcuts for frequent destination

Travellers frequently took flights to the same destination. We created shortcuts to frequent locations to make it easy.

Allow designated employees to book trips

Sometimes a designated employee would book tickets for travellers, we allowed these employees to book tickets for multiple travellers.

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Flight Results

Travellers did not want endless choices, only relevant choices.

Show compact, easy to compare results

We picked the most important information that could help make quick decisions.

Show layover times

The cheapest flights had the most number of connections and the longest layover times. We showed the amenities and layover time upfront.

Show validation for the recommendation

We should the exact reasons for a recommendation. This helped travellers make a calculated decision.

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Self Booking

Travellers liked the freedom of booking their flights.

Save card information

We found that travellers preferred to use the same cards to book their flights. we saved the information for commonly used cards to help book faster.

Other was to pay

The travellers would occasionally use other methods to pay. We allowed them to pay using the most common ways.

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Manage approvals

Travel managers got control over the workflow

Show travel request summary

Managers could see a list of requests. Each request had just enough summary needed to approve a request. Left swipe to approve and right swipe to reject.

Review request details

Some requests needed detailed review. We allowed them to review the details and highlight important information like the policy compliance and the budget upfront.

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Outcome

The travel management platform helped everybody in the company

Travellers liked the freedom of booking their own travel. Overall they found the experience positive and glad that they did not have to haggle with the travel agents any more.

Travel managers could concentrate on designing better travel policies. They did not spend any time coordinating with the travellers and agents.

Learning

It is important to keep everybody on the team up-to-date on the design details.

The final product will look as good as the documentation. Designers need to document the execution details because not everything is obvious in the Sketch or Figma file.

Mockup every screen for every flow to make everything crystal clear. This may seem like a daunting task, but it will be helpful during execution.

Add annotations and explanation to the design file. This will document all the design decisions. This will come in handy when you have to defend the design decisions.

Visually explain all the animations and transitions needed to take the experience to the next level. Use Framer or Principal to create prototypes for the animations. They help get a faster buy-in from the team.