SmartTravel

Context: 

The entertainment industry (movies and tv shows) needed a tool that made travel authorizations for Productions very easy and simple. A travel authorization (travel auth) is an approval of items and the cost of items on a Production related to travel. A use case for a travel authorization would be, if Julia Roberts was shooting a few scenes for a movie in NY and the Production was going to pay for her flight, car rental and hotel, all of those items need to be approved by different levels of the Production and Studio. 

Problem to be solved: 

The existing process for travel auths was email and Word/Excel dependent, with no digital tool. It was cumbersome for the travel coordinators to keep track of all the travel authorizations, many times being lost as just a piece of paper on someone's desk. This also made it hard for the approvers of the travel auths to remember that they had something on their plate to approve and to look at it in a timely manner.

This tool was built from scratch and was a joint effort between myself as the UX Designer, three developers, three QA, and a couple intermittent Product Managers.

I conducted various forms of user research throughout the design and development of this project. I conducted user interviews with multiple personas at varying levels of responsibility, speaking with users on the Production side (on the ground workers) as well as users from the Studio (high up executives). Once I had wireframes created, I conducted multiple rounds of usability testing with my wireframes. Once we had a working MVP, I then conducted more usability testing with the developed code.

While doing research, I realized there were a few complexities with this initiative. First, there was no standard travel auth process in the industry and the main existing process was Excel/Word and email based. Second, every Studio had a different approval process. This meant that the tool we were building needed to have a flexible enough workflow setup that could accommodate any of the varying approval processes from any of the major Studios. Lastly, there were many different personas who might need to use this tool in varying ways, and some personas with overlapping use cases.

The result was an easy to use, streamlined web application where Productions and Studios can digitally create and approve travel authorizations, complete with notification emails and visual workflows. The tool also accounted for roles, permissions, and admin features.