<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.

</aside>

Overview

TL;DR

• TripActions is a B2B travel and expense management platform that allows corporate travelers to manage their bookings, rentals, and payments. ✈️
• Over four weeks, we launched a dynamic travel integration tool for calendar apps that was quickly adopted and well-received by users. 📈

Background

Context

One of our highest priority user groups are executive assistants (EAs) who often use our platform to book travel on behalf of their executive. Our #1 piece of feedback from EAs was that although booking flights and hotels for their executive was easy enough, they had no way to manage these bookings afterwards on their executive’s calendar.

We saw this project as an opportunity for a quick win with a user group that’s responsible for a sizable chunk of our revenue.

My role and timeframe

As the sole designer, I worked with one product manager and one full stack engineer to ship this project over the course of four weeks during Q3 2019.

Approach

As is situation

There are three ways to see TripActions bookings on a calendar, none of which are fully intuitive or ideal end-to-end.

1. Through automatic email parsing: This is done by default through the email client, but not all TripActions emails are recognized as events. These events also have a default visibility of “Only me”, allowing other people to schedule over a flight.

   

   Email parsing

2. Through Settings: There’s a “Calendar Feed” link in Settings that can be added to an email client. However, this is a confusing process that works inconsistently and ultimately results in lots of questions directed towards our customer success team.

   

   Settings

3. Through the ICS files: There are ICS files attached to the bottom of every booking confirmation email, but almost no one looks at them.

   

   ICS files