Reinventing travel
across the firm.
Saving the company millions of dollars through reduced employee effort on critical booking tasks. I led the research, workshop, and design sessions of MyBooking, the corporate travel application for Morgan Stanley.
Morgan Stanley had not significantly updated their travel website in almost a decade. The legacy application they were using still had web 1.0 vibes and was a patchwork of competing and entrenched interests. The firm maintains many different policies around employee travel and has negotiated specific deals with airlines and hotels. Users have a wide range of travel needs depending on their position in the 70000 plus person organization. And the firm wants to prioritize travel savings. Balancing the role needs, effort, savings, and was difficult, which stymied the existing travel application and it had not seen a significant redesign in almost a decade. We took the application to task and achieved what some thought would be impossible. The newly redesigned travel website achieved time savings of up to ten times for key booking tasks leading to thousands of hours of employee effort and millions of dollars in savings for the firm. Frustration was down by seventy five percent in key workflows leading to unprecedented satisfaction among users. And we prioritized the firm’s important policies and partner deals.
I led the research sessions across five regions globally. We interviewed users about their travel and observed users booking travel, we talked with development partners and data suppliers, and we workshopped with stakeholders and users in mixed groups. This analysis revealed the scope of the problem the application faced. We discovered how important seamless travel was to heavy travelers and how problems with the system were affecting the quality of their work. We identified the different problems that users face across regions globally. And we quantified the scale of the problem across the firm.
We identified design patterns that were interrupting users’ days and bogging down their work flows costing tens of thousands of hours of employee effort per year.
We started planning with technical partners early on. We looked in depth at the existing stack to understand what we could leverage in a redesign. We assessed the team’s capabilities to ensure new work would fit within scope. And we figured out how we could modify the firm’s design system to stretch onto travel, which is very different from the firm’s other internal applications. By preplanning, integrating and leveraging the existing systems we were able to reduce the development time to around 3/4 of the original estimate.
The designs represented a major modernization of one of the firm’s principal internal applications and were a huge success. We added new features that were hailed as “time savers” and “incredibly useful for productivity”. We eliminated longstanding problems that users had called their “biggest source of stress at work”. We found time savings across the application and significant savings in key bottlenecks. Our projections showed that the sum of these efforts would save average users hours per trip, and that heavy users would see savings even greater. We promoted our partnerships, enriching those programs and projected reductions in travel expenses across the firm. Travel at Morgan Stanley has never been better.
