American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) is a B2B(2C) provider of business travel services and solutions. If you’ve ever booked a flight, hotel, rental car, even conference spaces for a business trip, you may be familiar with their services.
In 2017, AmEx GBT approached Rokkan to modernize it’s partner dashboard, named Explore, a white label solution that provides it’s client enterprises the ability to manage and track all GBT activity within their organization.
GBT, as a service, supports client businesses with a multitude of travel needs. Like many enterprise-level products, offering a menu of different capabilities, each business has specific service requirements; and not all GBT clients will subscribe to the platform’s full suite of products and services.
As such, the GBT Explore experience needed to elegantly support modularity.
Adding more complexity, each client has a range of roles, each with varying levels of administrative tasks and functional needs based on their organizational role within the platform.
Explore, as a first-launch, needed to support three major roles:
Travelers
Booking (links to GBT resources)
Flights
Hotels
Car Rentals
Conference Rooms
Reviewing
Company and account policies wrt:
per diems
expenditures
general policy
Managing
Profiles
Bookings
Managers
Additionally, to travelers
Analysis & Review
Utilization
Spending
Spending Trends
Approvals
Traveler bookings
Arrangers
Separate from managers, but additional to travelers:
Booking in lieu (e.g. executive assistant roles)
UX & Information Architecture
With Explore being a first-generation product, we aimed to create a foundation that could be elegantly extended well beyond its first iteration. We chose to keep architecture as simple as possible, accounting for major functional areas, and optimizing and experience for mobile.
The original brief gave us opportunities to explore more ambitious features, such as a message center for users to communicate with fellow colleagues. We decided to walk-back that and similar ideas, reasoning that user would already be familiar and regularly utilize other, established apps or resources.
Portlets (cards)
The only other feature to note are the portlets (dashboard modules). Dashboards of this era were customizable, allowing dragging and dropping of these modules to allow arrangements bespoke to the user.
