Travel Management Portal: A Case Study
Some of our most enjoyable work – where we’ve designed the application architecture and added the visual layer – has remained as a concept only. At times a variance of what we finalise with our client is put into production. Sometimes the reason for an application is to leverage some other mission of a business’ aspiration. It can often be, thankfully, that our client is choosing to role development out over a manageable period in unison with garnering feedback on early iterations and then cyclically improving the product. Essentially, continuing the prototyping and user testing and feedback sessions we run in our prototyping.
Recently, we took a look at a Corporate Services Travel Portal to inject some post-modernity and engagement and help provide a platform set the stage for the clients multi-channel marketing and personalisation plans. It’s the kind of project we like: a scoping session, preparing and preparing the client’s internal resource to conduct research of their own, prototyping our findings and scrutinising them under a, fortunately, positive straw-man review to see what areas required change or merely shelving.
Luckily for us, one of our team has over 30-years business travel development experience and so before the client had seen any of the work we had internally identified and noted for discussion any areas we thought needed further research and clarification before the client made observations of their own. On top of personas that were provided by the client, we generated scenarios, user stories, user testing plans and set up and handed over the keys to the client for a Kano modelling exercise to identify product requirements hierarchy. We also provided low-level and high-level prototypes and visual design style guides and some pretty useful service ideas for revenue generation through supplier-partners.
We completed our remit delving deeper into areas of the project reserved for later production – for example; we began generating meaningful animations for the user interface. To be honest, it can partly be a relief and somewhat a source of sorrow to hear the client say that they’ve got more than ample collateral for initial development. There are some non-revealing shots of the work below.
Product development and Service Design, much of what this project had begun to evolve into can set practitioners up for an incredible sense of immersion – a joy to the client who can be confident they have brought in resources who will be as conscientious about their aspirations as they are. This project, although it may not go into development for another year, like every other we engage on, was no exception. This project although further phases will undoubtedly be required to build on the product’s initial building blocks of personalisation and workflows is undoubtedly one of the most immersive projects we’ve worked on – as much as Hertz’s Connect by Hertz (hertz24ondemand), or the Call Centre Treatment Assessment software used by Remedi (Simply Health).
