Government travel made simple.

For GovGo, the government agency responsible for all federal employee travel wanted to rethink its online portal for booking and managing trips. At the time they were using two vendors to manage travel, but across the board users were unhappy with the experience and often confused by the booking process. Our team conducted significant user research with government employees across several agencies to uncover traveler needs. From those interviews, we derived a collection of insights that we considered our “true north” as we began to reimagine the new experience. We had the luxury of a “blue sky” as our limitation on technology, so our team was able to think creatively and be innovative without technological restraints.

As the sole visual designer on this project, I was responsible for creating the overall look and feel, as well as translating the final compositions into a clickable prototype. I worked alongside our UX team to ensure best practice on interaction patterns and we tested our prototype with government travelers. We were able to collect qualitative feedback that informed our next iteration of
designs.

One of the biggest wins from this project was our client relationship. Our team worked seamlessly with our client-side product owner to empower her to champion the product in her organization and to shape the future of government travel.

BOOKING

Our vision for the product was to create something that felt as comfortable and personal as a commercial booking site, both to keep the user in a frame of reference they were familiar with, as well as to attempt to improve employee perception of government travel.

AUTHORIZATION

Federal employees must get all of their travel related expenses authorized before they leave for their trip. Every user we spoke with told us that this was the most challenging part of the travel process. In order to make authorization easier, we created an interface that functions much like an interactive calendar. Users can sync their schedule with their authorization form to better estimate when there may be a need for a cab or a meal. Our long-term vision for this piece of the app was that the platform could suggest potential expenses that the employee may need to account for before leaving. 

VOUCHERS

After travel is complete, employees are required to submit receipts for all of the expenses they accounted for in the authorization stage of the process. Once these receipts are approved, the user is provided a voucher to reimburse them for their purchases. Often times, users will submit their receipts only to have them rejected because they lacked sufficient detail, thus delaying their vouchers.  Our goal within this part of the platform was to ensure that users could clearly see which of their expenses required a receipt or additional justification.