<aside> 🎨 In February 2023, TripActions rebranded itself as Navan. This project (and my time at the company) precedes the change, so this writeup reflects the old company name and branding.

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Overview

TL;DR

Background

Context

Towards the end of 2019, TripActions needed to quickly expand its trains offering in order to fulfill pilot contracts with several new European customers. This was a high visibility project since it was our foray into a new market with new revenue streams. However, we had two limiting factors from the get go:

  1. Our train pilots needed to launch towards the middle and end of Q1 2020 which left us a very short turn around time to deliver.
  2. Our train inventory was dependent on a partnership with Trainline, an independent UK-based rail and ticketing company. Trainline has an API that we were hoping to use, but it was unclear if we’d be able to go through their accreditation process and get access to their API in time to launch a robust trains solution.

My role and timeframe

As the sole designer, I worked with our product, operations, and support teams based in Palo Alto, CA and our engineering team based in Russia over the course of twelve weeks to get these pilots ready.

Chat to Book

Approach

Paths to move forward

As someone [very American] with limited experience with trains, there was a lot for me to learn. We started off by auditing several ticketing platforms, gathering feedback from my European co-workers who were more well versed with trains [because they have them], and conducting a few ideation sessions with my design, product, and operations teams.

Given the nature of the project, we needed to make sure our executive team was onboard with our approach, so we presented two potential solutions: