Building a corporate travel management portal for business clients partnering with a world-class service brand
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 design a new partner dashboard, Explore. What resulted is a white label platform that gives client enterprises and their (traveling) employees the ability to manage and track all business travel activity within their organizations.
Role
Experience Design Director
Focus
UX, Product design
Duration
8-week redesign + 3 month optimization period
The challenge
GBT 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; not all GBT clients will subscribe to the platform’s full suite of products and services, meaning the Explore experience needed to be elegantly modular.
Adding more complexity, each client has a range of roles, each with varying levels of administrative capabilities and functional needs.
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 would be extended well beyond its MVP. We chose to keep architecture as simple as possible, accounting for major functional areas, and optimizing an experience for mobile.
The original brief gave us opportunities to explore a greater suite of features, such as a message center for users to communicate with fellow colleagues. However, we avoided creating unnecessary redundancy with services/apps users would naturally already be using.
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.
