I delivered a consistent and improved employee experience for an internal platform that supports their business operations across multiple brands
Industry
Travel
Role
Product Designer
Responsibilities
Product Strategy
End-to-end Visual Design
Interaction Design
Overview
Context
In 2020, a Fortune 500 travel company had a goal of consolidating to one global travel operation across their multiple brands. The product vision would consolidate multiple legacy systems and establish a consistent and improved employee experience across the client’s diverse locations and business lines.
As a Product Designer, I was tasked to partner with Product and Development teams to deliver wireframes of future feature enhancements for a specific workstream. Our project team worked directly with the client’s product teams and development teams to design towards a unified employee-facing platform.
Key Milestone
10m+
Make 10m+ transactions
500+
Live at 500+locations
2
Across two countries
By 2024 the application is live at over 500+ locations across business lines, two North American countries and multiple global brands. The first phase of launch was piloted at 300+ airport locations, exceeding 50,000 total transactions. In addition, we successfully sunsetted one of the legacy applications.
The Approach
My Role
As the Senior Product Designer part of a dedicated design team of four, I worked on R&D efforts with partnership with the product and development teams. My product design work contributed to the program’s effort to consolidate their legacy rental platforms and its functionalities into one single experience.
Project Highlights
Product Roadmap and Backlog
I co-led the quarterly roadmap sessions with the Product team to create a prioritized product backlog where we size the work and create a realistic roadmap for the next launch with the client. Complex features were further broken into smaller stories during refinements. Each feature was sized to understand the workload and taken into various sprints.
DesignOps
I scaled workflow efficiency by defining team file structure, taxonomy and visual pattern. My team and I utilized an atomic design approach to organizing and structuring both the component library and template library to ensure design patterns are accessible and consistent across workstreams.
Prototype and Feedback
I delivered high-fidelity wireframes that captured interaction design details and functional requirements for every interface we designed. If features had unclear requirements, I did upfront lean research or facilitated co-creation workshops to figure out what we’re solving for rather than jumping into designs.
Also feedback played an important role in the design and development of the process. I led design reviews and product demos with both product teams and development teams to ensure that my UI designs and specifications met the requirements and were technically feasible. In addition, I created prototypes for user testing and reiterated designs based on user feedback.
Development Handoff and Iteration
I provided developer-ready handoffs that included wireframes, design specification, and feature walkthroughs during each sprint. Prior to handoffs, I checked with the development team to ensure UI solution is technical feasible and reiterate based on technical feedback.
Final Thought
Project Transition
This project was transitioned to the internal design team to continue supporting the company's broader strategy to modernize their internal tools. Going beyond basic screen-by-screen designs, I demonstrated my leadership by driving key operational improvements within the design team by enabling faster feeedback loop and deeper integration with product and development partners.
My Impact
Iterative Feedback Loops
I reinforced the value of continuous user feedback to refine features and sought technical feedback from development teams to ensure UI designs were technically feasible. This iterative feedback loop has broken silos amongst teams and led to succcessful positive project outcomes.
Accessibility Advocate
I not only strengthen my skills in designing inutitive, inclusive solutions but also provided guidance around web accessibility in my product space with my product and development partners.
New QA processes
I established a new QA processes by giving product and deveopment teams UI bug feedback, which expanded the design team's capability outside the screen design handoffs. Previously the UX team was not involved with the QA process. This new process reduced the number of UX debt and led to quicker production-ready features.
Coached Others
I demonstrated my leadership by coaching team members to tackle growth opportunities and encourage autonomy. Before transitioning off the project, I helped the internal design team to reach their yearly goals.
Quotes
[Glo] likes to do things the right way. She has appreciation for the craft and for providing high quality work. The project I'm on involves system-level design thinking and she's been a great fit for the work. My job is wildly less stressful because I know that she will get things done and get it done right.
–Senior Product Designer
[Glo's] ability to motivate others, provide structure in uncertain moments and foster a continuous improvement mindset has been critical to our momentum. I appreciate her leadership, collaboration, and commitment to elevating the team on our share outcomes.
–Project Manager
“Glo has a customer-first mindset and a deep understanding and empathy for their journey that leads her to create impactful designs that customers and clients love.
She provides thoughtful suggestions to the direction of the products she works in as well as ways to improve processes and the team's ways of working. She is always willing to lend a helping hand to others and walk the "extra mile" to ensure we're delivering the best possible outcomes.”
–Product Designer
It's easy. That's the way it should be. I can tell that there's some feedback taken from last time. At first it felt kind of clunky and I think now it's much more of a natural flow for both people in x and y.
–User