Designing for growth in the Creator Economy

FOCUS AREAS:

Product Design

Marketing Design

Art Direction

Interaction Design

Convertkit

Idaho, US

2021

The business of arranging travel for companies has always been fraught with challenges. In Africa, these challenges are made more significant by antiquated booking and invoicing systems that make it difficult for companies to manage their travel effectively.

To make things worse, most companies have to deal with multiple travel providers, issuing invoices in various formats and currencies, making it difficult to manage them.

Africans have a great deal of potential not being harnessed because of these issues, especially in business capacity building. All too often, a lack of technological infrastructure is an obstacle to achieving the full potential of a business.

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Project Goals: We set out to build a product to help companies manage their travel effectively.

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Key assumptions;

Companies are looking for new systems for managing corporate travel.
Group travel is an upcoming trend in corporate culture, especially in a semi-remote post-pandemic world.
Team leads and HR personnel want more visibility on trip expenditure with company funds.

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My Role

I was a product designer on this project. I collaborated on a web application and a cross-platform mobile application. I also worked with a client-side product manager and a contracted engineering team as part of the product team. We were handed a PRD with relevant information and constraints. We also had a short project timeline to work with compared to the project scope.

I contributed to product design efforts on the web app and with some input on the native mobile app. We also initiated a rebrand during the project.

Find available flights at the best rates, pay in groups

We designed a 3-step flow to book a flight or hotel. The user can also create a group trip with fellow colleagues and send an expense report to management (the super user) for approval.

Easily track business trip schedules, budgets, receipts

An employee (regular user) or a manager (super user) can monitor travel itinerary for self and for team members, respectively.

Special admin privileges for team leads and employers.

During discovery sessions, we noticed that company heads (in charge of planning business trips for large groups of people at a time) needed more efficient tools to manage budget overruns and expense reports.

A mobile app for constantly being on the move.

We also designed a native mobile app for both emloyees and employers to use while in transit.

Some Takeaways

This project was a fascinating problem to solve because we were designing simultaneously for two types of users. I got to explore how to designate roles and privileges properly in a closed system. It was challenging to keep track of the project scope because of how interconnected most things seemed to be. However, we made sure to keep fellow teammates engaged and accountable.

There were also times when we colored a little outside the PRD’s lines. For example, when we designed the ability to group employees into departments to ease the scheduling of group trips. Like many breakthroughs during the project, this design direction came from effective collaboration and open communication.

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