Bookmate_
Booking and tracking your
business travels made simple
Have you ever lost a boarding pass for your business travel in a sea of emails? Bookmate allows employees to book and track their business flights all in one app. Efficiency for your employees and for your business
Designing a new travel booking app that generales revenue in the flying purchase market for both Android and iOS? Challenge accepted!
A solo 1-week-project where my focus was thinking about business opportunities within my designs and executing a visual app prototype appropriate for iOS & Android.
Wait a minute, why focusing
on business travels?_
Let’s have a look at the numbers:
30% of European corporate travelers fly once per month. 62% travel once per year. 5% travel 21 to 40 times per year.
Companies realize $12.50 in incremental revenue for every dollar invested in business travel.
69% of business travelers report that they book travel themselves regardless of the type of booking.
While desktop bookings still reign supreme, 79% of corporate travelers have completed a business trip booking on their mobile device.
57% of travelers want a single app for all of their travel planning and booking needs.
While business travelers typically make up just 12% of all flyers, they are twice as profitable to airlines because they are loyal and use frequent flier programs
_RESEARCH & INSIGHTS
After interviewing frequent business travelers,
doing benchmarking on booking apps and
studying traveling statistics, this is what I found out:
And so I found the business opportunity
The way of booking business travels is far from ideal for both companies and employees. The communication flow falls short, email bookings details are not practical and no employee likes paying for his/her expenses
_PROBLEM STATEMENT
We have chosen to focus mainly on travelers and, by doing that, we will be helping companies too
How might we help business travelers book and organice their travels efficiently without having to pay for the flights themselves
_ USER PERSONA
In order to define a specific user flow, I distilled all the insights thrown by my research into an ideal user persona.
And so without further ado, here is Alicia:
“I know I said it before, but I am gonna get more organized this year”
Alicia travels a lot for work. Whenever she has one of those travels, she will ask the person in charge to book her tickets and send them to her but sometimes tickets get lost in a sea of emails or she has to wait forever for the person in charge to answer her request.
And giving that she is not the most persona in the world, planning her work trips and keep track of her schedule is not an easy task for her.
_SCENARIO
Alicia is on a plane ready to fly to Istanbul for work when she gets an email from a retailer in Milan asking her for a meeting next week.
The stewardess is giving her the stinky look meaning that Alicia has only a couple of minutes before she is asked to switch off her phone but she is gonna try and request that flight to Milan anyways… Wish her luck!
Click here to interact
with BookMate’s prototype
_USER FLOW
Because Alicia is not alone in here, she needs a bit of help from the human resources team
_THE PROCESS
Let’s take a look back:
INITIAL STAGE
User interviews (6 people)
Benchmarking (7 companies)
Establishing business goals: MVP feature priorization
Paper prototyping
MID STAGE
Mid-fi prototypes (2 iterations)
Exploring visual design pathways
User testing (5 people)
FINAL STAGE
User testing (7 people)
Hi-fi prototypes (3 iterations)
Deciding specifics of UI elements
Animation
Translation from iOS to Android
The look & feel
After the mid fi prototype, the design went through three iteration fases were changes were made to meet the problems we encountered after several usability tests
Bigger fonts
Add pending request to main screen
Add “send reminder” button
Change request button
Add caption to icons
Add caption to back arrows
Background color light gray on screens with“flight cards”
We speak both
The app was originally designed for iOS but we did translate to Android. This are the biggest changes
Navigation changed to a bold color with highlighted category in white.
Back button navigation arrow Android style without breadcrumb.
Main action button changed to a floating one.
Notification designed changed on locked page.
Keyboard changed to Android style.
Next steps
Develop a chat within the app for last minute changes and or emergencies.
Create a feature to share your flight schedule with other colleagues.
Extend request bookings options to hotels, transportation, etc.
Key learnings
Research is important even when we think we have al the insights we need.
Critics rounds and usability testing help the designer see what couldn’t have been seen otherwise.
Benchmarking is a good way to detect hits and misses.
