Corporate Travel Policy (Upside Business Travel)

TLDR: How can a company create a set of rules and parameters to manage employees’ business travel? What guardrails need to exist in the booking tool to help employees to make smart and thrifty travel decisions? I led the design of a completely new corporate travel policy feature for Upside’s customers. The new tool resulted in an increased: conversion rate, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

Organization: Upside Business Travel
Role: Lead UX Designer - responsible for research, usability testing, interaction design, UI design
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Qualaroo, and FullStory
Length of Project: 3 months
Team: Product Manager, Developers (6)
Deliverables: Competitive analysis, user and stakeholder interviews, low fidelity wireframes and prototype, user flows, high fidelity prototype, usability tests and findings, defining metrics for success

Overview of Upside

Upside Business Travel was a digital travel management platform based in Washington, D.C. Its value proposition was that it was an intuitive, user-friendly, one-stop shop for consumers to book all elements of their business travel, and for travel administrations to manage their employees’ travel program.

While at Upside, I was in charge of the pre- and post-shopping experience, which included management-level features like expenses, reporting, receipts, itinerary, and travel policy.

Problem Statement

This particular project started with our customer-experience team wanting to close a product gap: Upside’s clients had cited its lack of travel guidelines/policy as the primary reason they took their business elsewhere. (A corporate travel and expense policy is a set of guidelines for work-related trips.)

Design Process

I followed a user-centered design consisting of 3 key phases:

• Understand

• Explore

• Materialize

Within these larger buckets were other phases, such as: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, testing, and implementation.

Discovery Phase: Stakeholder Interviews

I kicked off the “understand” or discovery phase by talking to stakeholders — in this case Upside’s business team — and asked them open-ended questions. For example: How does this project fit into the overall mission and goals of Upside? Why is the feature important? What does success look like? And so forth.

Some of the feedback we got back was:

• Stakeholders believed that Upside would be able to sign up more customers and grow the business if we had a corporate travel policy.

• A policy feature would also help the company fulfill its mandate and extend its mission: to reduce friction and frustration for travelers and travel managers. 

Discovery Phase: User Interviews

From there I conducted 30-minute 1-on-1 interviews with 6 customers — including travel managers, administrators, and business travelers — to gain a better understanding of their attitudes, beliefs, values, and pain points regarding business travel.

Before I began the user interviews, I assumed that the main reason travelers needed an easy-to-follow travel policy was to keep travel expenditures as low as possible — and that this was a top-of-mind concern for their travel administrators and finance teams.

As I went through the discovery phase, however, I was surprised to discover that: 

• Business travelers aren’t generally hardwired to spend as much money as possible. In fact, most don’t need rigid company policies in order to stay in policy.

• Company administrators want money-saving, cost-controlling policies that don’t infringe on their travelers’ freedom. By and large, they value their employees’ safety and comfort.

• Restrictive travel policies are a significant pain point for travelers and administrators, because travelers rarely book out-of-policy unless there are extenuating circumstances — a last-minute flight, for exampleAdmins ultimately approve these flights, but by the time they do so, a traveler may have missed their flight, or seen the ticket price increase.

Key Customer Insights

Before I began the user interviews, I assumed that the main reason travelers needed a travel policy was to keep travel costs as low as possible.

As I talked to customers, I was surprised to discover that: 

• Business travelers aren’t generally hardwired to spend as much money as possible. In fact, most of them don’t need rigid company policies in order to stay within policy; they often try to keep their spending costs low themselves.

• Company administrators do prioritize money-saving policies, but say they want ones that don’t infringe on their travelers’ freedom. By and large, they value their employees’ safety and comfort.

• Restrictive travel policies are a significant pain point for travelers and administrators alike, because travelers — as I just mentioned — rarely book out-of-policy unless there are extenuating circumstances. So if travelers have to book a last-minute flight, Admins — who understand their need — will approve them. But by the time the flight has been approved, the ticket price might have increased. Or the desired flight is no longer available.Additionally, many competitors took a blunt-force design approach to messaging policy, with lots of warning modals, alert icons, and the like.

Exploratory Phase: Competitive Analysis

In the exploratory phase, I did a direct competitive analysis to see how other corporate travel platforms implemented a travel policy. 

What I learned was that they varied in terms of restrictiveness and specificity.

Many of Upside’s competitors had what’s known as a hard travel policy, meaning that a traveler needs a supervisor’s permission before booking any trip. 

Additionally, many competitors took a blunt-force design approach to messaging policy, with lots of warning modals, alert icons, and the like. In the exploratory phase I did a competitive analysis to see how other corporate travel platforms implemented a travel policy.

Trust and Empower Employees (aka Design Principles)

At this point I felt confident, based on my research, that a clear and effective travel policy could reduce confusion and hassle while also empowering and trusting travelers to make the right decisions.

Thus, I proposed to stakeholders that we shouldn’t prevent travelers from booking their own flights. Instead, our travel policy should inform travelers when a flight is out of policy. Users would then have an opportunity, during checkout, to explain why they selected an out-of-policy flight. 

This spirit of empowering and trusting users helped guide and inform my design approach.

User Stories

From there, I created user stories that were informed by my research. 

I find that user stories — sometimes known as “user need statements” — can help prompt innovation and keep designs user-centered. They are also helpful when it comes to aligning team members and stakeholders.

Ideating

I started sketching and designing various approaches, meeting with my PM and lead engineer to understand the various technical limitations and constraints. 

One consideration that I kept in mind was scalability. I knew that after releasing an MVP for flight travel policy, the design would need to evolve to include other travel elements, such as hotels and rental cars.

With that in mind, I thought about how I could create an interface and design elements that were both dynamic and flexible enough to allow the feature to grow.

Some of my considerations included:

• Would there be separate sections for different travel policy elements? For instance, would rental cars, flights, and hotels each have their own dedicated section?

• Would an Admin be able to create an infinite number of policies? Or would there be a limit that could then be applied to certain groups?

Usability Tests

I conducted a lot of usability tests with Upside customers (both current clients and potential ones) to assess my design approach and identify any areas where flight policy was unclear, determine whether users understood how flight policy works, learn whether travel administrators could easily and successfully set a travel policy, and, generally, assess whether the designs were clear and straightforward.

Designs

I designed a new out-of-policy icon for the shopping and booking flow, determined where the travel policy would surface in the shopping and booking flow, created an out-of-policy notification email, and developed a new section in the company settings for administrators to set and manage their travel policies. I ran usability tests with customers along the way to help me validate and modify the designs.

MVP

My final designs included:

• a new policy icon, which I placed at appropriate points in the shopping and booking flow

• an out-of-policy notification that admins received (via email), which gave them the ability to cancel a traveler’s flight if need be

• a new section in the company settings for administrators to set and manage travel policies

Results

By creating a travel policy in the shopping and booking flow that clarified what was in and out of policy, we were ultimately able to sign up more clients.

Just as important, Upside travelers began to increasingly book within policy, because the process was so clear, concise, and user-friendly.

This also equaled cost savings for companies, which now had better oversight and data regarding how their employees were booking traveling.

What’s more, Upside’s customer experience (CX) team heard from clients that the new policy had helped create a level of trust with employees and lessened the burden on managers and administrators.

I continued to iterate on travel policy while at Upside, expanding travel policy to include other elements of travel such as car rentals and hotels.