Travelport Locomote

The merging of three distinct systems had introduced some inconsistencies, presenting a golden opportunity to standardise the components and styles, unify the experience, and bake in accessibility across the platform.

With the aim of improving platform usability, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of six months of customer support tickets, and interviewed eight people, including two with visual impairments. We uncovered insights into severa; usability challenges, which we categorised into five segments based on platform components.
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Dashboard
Displays upcoming and past bookings and facilitates travel management.

Booking Tool
Enables users to segment flights, trains, hotels, or vehicle rentals for their trip.
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Travel Requirement
Allows users to input information according to their company's specific trip preparation workflow.

Summary & Payment
Communicates vital information before a trip is confirmed.

Our research revealed several recurring behaviours within the platform, impacting the navigation and the booking segments thus affecting the usability of the platform. These included:

•Lack of a global navigation, created nested pages with valuable booking information, resulting in users missing flights.  

• Lack of clear labelling, leading to prolonged decision-making processes for users, taking on average 8-15 minutes to complete a booking.

• Non-responsive segments on the platform, a particularly terrible experience on Android devices.

• Missing itinerary information from the dashboard.

• Excessive use of contrasting colours.

• Failure in keyboard accessibility tests

To get a better understanding of accessibility best practices, I evaluated other WCAG 2.0 AA compliant sites, including some competitors, to form the basis for the new design system.

The next step was to observe some of our visually impaired users, creating user journeys to document their current experiences on the Locomote platform and capturing their behaviours. Additionally, I conducted qualitative interviews with them to learn about other applications and websites they use.

To facilitate scoping and project estimation, I created low-fidelity wireframes and user flows outlining enhancements and changes based on the conducted research. This enabled the team to accurately guage engineering efforts and plan out the sprints needed for the project.

Given the size of the project we opted to enhance the current platform by updating styles, headers, fonts, and colours, along with implementing keyboard accessibility and resolving device-responsive issues, thereby ensuring accessibility compliance faster to market and allowing more time for the redesign.

To kickstart the redesign, I shared the low-fidelity wireframes with the frontend and engineering leads. Through collaboration, we pinpointed the required components and decided to utilise the existing frontend framework for efficiency and customisation. Subsequently, I developed various low-fidelity designs and layouts, evaluating them internally and with 8 users, including 2 visually impaired individuals from the original cohort. This feedback was crucial in iterating and refining the designs, and obtaining internal sign-off.

To manage the significant engineering effort and the number of required sprints, we devised a plan to roll out the enhancements in train releases. This approach ensured that user experience wouldn't be compromised by frequent interface updates that are required for the redesign of the platform also manage my time to produce the volume of assets required.

Although the project scope was ambitious for a single designer, maturing the user experience of the product proved to be a significant learning experience. Ensuring the product met accessibility standards allowed for simplification of the cognitive load for users during booking, particularly by streamlining workflows, and revamping the copy. Consequently, we successfully unified the three products to provide continuity and create a cohesive user experience.

The platform's WCAG 2.0 AA compliance and fulfilment of contractual obligations has opened up opportunities for Travelport Locomote to win more government and university clients. User bookings have been made faster by an average of 22% thanks to the design update, resulting in a 30% decrease in customer service calls.