Upside Travel Policy

Upside Business Travel allowed admins to have control over their travel policies without being too restrictive to be usable. Here's how we went about optimizing our policy offerings.

Upside Business Travel

Our clients needed a way to keep track of travel spending and always need to be mindful of duty of care responsibilities.

Problem: Clients needed to be able to manage spending and ensure that their employees were booking vehicles that met the standards of their business.

Project Goals

Give admins more granular control over their policies without making the process too cumbersome or difficult to use. We also did a general test to ensure the copy on the page was not confusing to the user.

Project Timeline

2/20-03/20

Responsibilities

User Research, Prototyping, UX design

What policy options were available previously?

Before we started working on how to best add this feature, users were only able to set maximum price per day and the amount of time reservations needed to be booked in advance of their trip. We did competitive analysis, surveying, and testing to determine if our hypothesis was backed by user input and data

Problems to solve for:

  1. Admins needed more control over spending than was currently available.
  2. Admins have a responsibility to maintain quality standards as well as keep duty of care top of mind.
  3. Upside needed to continue to be competitive in the travel management space.

Initial Exploration:

We explored a few different hypotheses including solutions for hotel pricing based on location, star rating minimums and, setting approved vehicle types for rentals. In order to keep the scope reasonable, we decided to investigate the latter two.

  • Hypothesis 1: Minimum star ratings would help admins improve quality of working conditions, and insure employee safety.
  • Hypothesis 2: Control over rental car types would have a similar effect as the above, but also help admins control spending.

User Personas:

These were the proto-personas that we used to help guide our discovery process:

Value Add:

Adding more options for travel policy oversight will help admins keep spending on rental cars in the appropriate range as well as allowing them to insure that their employees are renting cars that meet the company's safety and quality standards.

Value Add:

Traveling is stressful, and knowing that your company is insuring my personal comfort and safety can increase productivity, and lower turnover rates. Making low-quality hotels unavailable helps keep employees out of dangerous areas and uncomfortable conditions.

Subsequent Research & Narrowing of Scope

We engaged in a number of research and testing methods in order to validate our hypotheses:

  • I prototyped the two different car selection options as well as the star rating setting for hotels. In addition, we asked general questions about the existing copy to determine if any of the language was confusing to users. We uploaded this to usertesting.com with a requirement that the user arranged business travel for their colleagues.
  • We found that some of the previous language was indeed confusing to users, and uploaded a new survey with updated copy to test.
  • We found that users were confused by the chip design, but that the checkbox format was intuitive.
  • Some users stated that they had similar vehicle policies at their current place of work.
  • Competitive Analysis showed us that star rating requirements were fairly standard, however, our users responded more positively to a minimum rating during testing.

UI A/B test

The user experience of this page was already working well for our customers. We worked through a few options and ended up testing these two options against eachother. The check boxes were overwhelmingly easier to understand based on user feedback. We implemented the check boxes and put a track on it to monitor it's usability.

We got a lot of user feedback like this:

“Our company is very focused on duty of care when our employees are traveling. Currently I have to manually check to see if the hotel that was booked is appropriate for the trip.”

“We have had some problems with repeat offenders booking luxury vehicles. This feature would help me track what kind of rentals employees are booking.”

What We Shipped:

More control for admins, less worry for travelers.

  • The addition of the star rating feature was positively received by admins that we interviewed.
  • More granular rental car vehicle control reportedly lowered costs for up to 5% for some of our clients.
  • Admins expressed increased ability to monitor if employees were abusing their rental car policies.
  • Future research was going to be done to investigate how we could optimize max hotel nightly rates to accomodate for the wide differences in prices per area.