WorldMate is a personal Travel Assistant for business travelers. WorldMate automatically organizes your trips, sends you flight alerts, recommends great hotels for booking, and offers a wide array of other travel services.
In 2012, WorldMate become part of the Carlson Wagonlit family — the world’s largest corporate travel agency with over 18,000 employees spanning 150 countries.
Shortly after joining the team, I was assigned to work on a new feature - Team Travel.
###Research
This feature got traction when user interviews showed more than 40% of our users travel together with colleagues, in groups of up to 5 in most cases. That’s the momentum our product team needed to move it from the backlog into work.
After discussing the feature with our PM, we set some goals:
Know your colleagues arrival/departure time at/from the destination
Know which hotel your colleagues have booked
Get alerts when a colleague is delayed
From a product stand point, Team Travel looked like a winner:
Improve user engagement - Users that are part of a Team Travel, will return to the app more often
Drive new users - Users who start Team Travel will invite non WorldMate users to join them in trip
Demonstrate innovation - Team Travel will lead to PR buzz on social, travel analysts and tech media outlets
###Exploring Design
The UI design was coming along and I was exploring different options for each screen.
I used prototypes made in Invision to validate ideas quickly, doing short user testing in-house with my colleagues, fitting our user persona.
I combined the micro-interactions into a full design flow map, taking into account the various entry points and trying to cover all edge cases.
###Its not you, it’s the data
Something was off. It was’nt the visual design or the micro-copy. All of us at the team felt the feature was “flat”.
Only after various iterations and once I put a device in people hands, we could see our current data is lacking.
We needed a deeper infrastructure data layer that will give us more insightful information about the connections of our users. To create a truly innovative feature like Team Travel, we’ll need to dig deeper and provide more value to our users than what we had.
###Closing
This is quite common in product design. Sometimes because the feature isn’t fully defined, other times the market is not ready or simply you ran out of budget.
We decided the best thing is to go back to the drawing board, equipped we all the insights we gathered, and get our BI team on the job, adding needed layers of relations and social to our existing database.
CWT’s management team has decided to terminate WorldMate as of end of March 2017, and focus all effort on CWT To Go app. Check out the case study to learn more.
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