IMPACT
Solved Complex Industry Problems: Delivered impactful design solutions addressing core challenges in specialized corporate travel management.
Secured Major Client Adoption: Achieved rapid platform adoption and successful launches with 10+ Fortune 500 clients, including Amazon, Meta, and Walmart. Drove Business Growth: Directly contributed to winning major enterprise contracts and significantly increasing company revenue.
ROLE
Sole Designer: Architected the foundational "Events" platform (0-to-1). Led the pivotal evolution from "Events" to the industry-leading SPD platform.
TEAM
Directed core global XFN team (5 Eng, PM, UX Writer, Brand Designer, etc.).
Aligned key stakeholder teams (Sales, Mktg, Corporate, TMC, Data etc.).
DURATION
Phase 1/ Events 10, 2023- 9.2024
Phase 2/ SPD 9, 2024 - NOW
From Group Events to Specialty Desk
Evolving our approach to specialized travel
Project Overview
This project chronicles the significant evolution of Spotnana's travel management capabilities, originating from a focused solution for group event travel and expanding into a comprehensive platform addressing diverse, specialized travel needs across the enterprise.
I utilized this iterative development process to guide both the foundational 'Events' design and the strategic evolution to 'Specialty Desk' (SPD). As the Sole Designer and initial lead before a dedicated PM assignment, I drove the process from discovery through delivery for Events (top). Recognizing its limitations, I spearheaded the strategy and initiation of SPD (bottom), adapting the core learnings and leading cross-functional teams to develop a flexible platform for diverse travel scenarios, demonstrating proactive leadership in product expansion.
Phase 1 - Event
The Problem
A maze of manual work and endless emails, the event group travel process buried administrators in error-prone tasks and offered no self-service for travelers.
What We Achieved
Today, the Events platform is live, transforming how companies manage group travel. By replacing a cumbersome, manual process with an automated, self-service solution, the platform empowers event organizers, delights traveling employees, and provides companies with unprecedented control over their travel programs. The release led to significant client acquisition, with major companies like Meta, Amazon, and Walmart adopting the platform for their group travel needs.
75%
Reduction in HR Admin Time
This was reduced from an estimated 2.5+ hours of manual work per event (emailing, chasing info, compiling spreadsheets) to less than 30 minutes required to set up the event and send an invite.
90%
Faster End-to-End Booking Cycle
The entire process, from sending the first invitation to having all travelers confirmed, was cut from an average of 3-5 business days down to just a few hours, with employees able to book their travel in minutes.
100%
Automated Policy Compliance
We moved from a system of inconsistent manual checks to a platform with built-in policy enforcement. This ensures every self-booked trip is automatically 100% compliant with company rules for flights and hotels, eliminating rogue spending.
Uncovering the Core Challenge
Core Problem 1
Manual Inefficiency & Error
The entire process relies on disconnected spreadsheets and manual data entry. This wastes dozens of hours for administrators and is highly susceptible to costly human error.
Core Problem 2
Policy Confusion & Friction
A persistent communication gap exists between administrators and travelers. Critical travel policies are buried in emails, causing traveler confusion, repetitive questions for admins, and a frustrating booking experience.
Core Problem 3
Lack of Real-Time Oversight
There is no centralized system to track bookings or spending as they happen. This lack of visibility makes it impossible to enforce policies proactively or manage event budgets effectively, creating significant financial risk.
Humanizing the Problem with Personas
Primary Persona -
Alex, the People Operations Manager
Secondary Persona -
David, the Employee
Role
Alex is responsible for organizing company events, from team offsites to annual kick-offs. Her role is a hybrid of event coordination and HR oversight.
Context
As a traveler, David's core booking journey already exists in our platform. His main interaction with the new design is at the very beginning of his journey.
Goals
Execute flawless, engaging events that run smoothly. Ensure every traveling employee has a positive experience while staying strictly within company travel policy and safety guidelines.
Goals
To quickly understand the travel rules for a specific event and book his trip with minimal hassle.
Frustrations
The constant tension between managing logistical details in spreadsheets and manually enforcing complex travel policies. She lacks a centralized tool, leading to endless email chains and a high risk of error.
Mapping Solutions to Needs
Wireframing the Admin's Workflow
With a clear strategic framework, the next step was to translate the core administrative workflow into low-to-mid-fidelity wireframes. The primary goal was to design an intuitive, end-to-end journey for 'Alex,' our People Ops Manager persona. I focused on creating a centralized command center that would eliminate her reliance on spreadsheets and provide clarity and control over the entire event travel process, from creation to monitoring.
Key Insight
Resulting Action
Streamlined Event Configuration: Implementing a single-page or multi-step wizard UI to minimize navigation and reduce cognitive load, thereby achieving rapid event setup and accelerated task completion through an optimized user flow.
Intelligent Policy Simplification: Leveraging contextual intelligence to enable the system to pre-select applicable policies based on event type. This automation significantly reduces decision fatigue and manual effort for HR, especially when unfamiliar with diverse team policies, ensuring a more efficient and accurate process.
Robust & Usable Traveler Management: Designing a powerful yet intuitive traveler management interface with clear information architecture and efficient interaction patterns, ensuring high usability and a seamless experience. The UI style will be clean and functional, supporting rapid data handling and task execution.
Iterated on the design to include "Viewed Invitation" and "Started Booking" statuses in the attendee list.
Testing Method
Participants
Task Scenario
Key Metrics
Moderated Remote Usability Testing
5 People Operations Managers (matching the 'Alex' persona)
Set up the annual sales kick-off for 20 people and apply the 'Executive' travel policy."
Task completion rate, qualitative feedback on ease of use, time on task.
Design
Streamlining Group Travel Management for Admins
My primary objective was to empower administrators by transforming a complex process into an intuitive and efficient workflow. This required a user-centric approach focused on clarity, control, and reducing administrative overhead.
Event Listing Page
The Admin's Command Center
Admins needed a single source of truth for all travel events. The Event Listing Page was designed as their central command center.
Centralized Hub: Provides a comprehensive overview of all upcoming, past, and draft events in one scannable view.
At-a-Glance Information: Surfaces key details like dates, location, and booking status, allowing for rapid assessment without clicking into each event.
Action-Oriented Design: Key user flows like Create New Event and Edit Event are prioritized, enabling admins to take immediate action.
Design Goal: To grant admins immediate visibility and control, significantly cutting down on time spent searching for information.
Event Creation
A Guided '0-to-1' Experience
This was the core of our '0 to 1' pilot. The primary challenge was to consolidate all necessary configurations into a frictionless, guided experience.
From Zero to One: Architected the entire event creation flow from the ground up, focusing on a logical, step-by-step process.
Unified Configuration: Designed a single, comprehensive page to prevent user drop-off and minimize the cognitive load of navigating multiple screens.
Step 1/
Foundational Event Details
The first step had to be effortless, capturing the most critical information without ambiguity.
Intuitive Input: Focused on clarity and efficiency for essential fields: event name, a searchable location, start/end dates, and the attendee travel window.
Prioritized Information: The design hierarchy ensures admins can input this foundational data quickly, establishing the event's framework in moments.
Step 2/
Granular Policy Control
A key user pain point was the inability to set event-specific travel policies, leading to compliance issues.
Solving a Core Problem: Directly addressed administrative frustration by building in flexible policy assignment.
Empowering User Choice: A simple toggle allows admins to either apply default company policies or assign a unique policy for the specific event.
Critical Control: This feature provides essential granular control, ensuring event-specific compliance and budget adherence from the outset.
Strategic Feature
AI-Powered Event Branding
To elevate the event beyond pure logistics, we introduced a feature focused on brand identity and visual engagement. This was a deliberate decision to add a layer of polish and differentiate the product.
A Strategic Value-Add| Flexible & Intelligent Options| Boosting Brand & Engagement| Business & Marketing Differentiator.
Attendee Management
From Onboarding to Monitoring
Once an event is configured, the focus shifts to managing the attendees. My goal was to design a closed-loop system that eliminates manual email tracking and provides admins with clear, actionable insights.
Flexible & Efficient Onboarding
To eliminate friction when creating the attendee list, the design needed to support both small- and large-scale additions seamlessly.
Dual-Pathways: Provided two distinct, clearly marked options: + Add Single Traveler for quick, individual additions and + Bulk Upload Travelers for efficiently onboarding entire groups at once.
Design Goal: To make the initial onboarding of attendees as frictionless as possible, regardless of the event size.
At-a-Glance Status Tracking
The primary user pain point was a lack of visibility into traveler progress. The dashboard was designed to provide ultimate clarity.
Centralized Dashboard: Replaced chaotic email threads with a single source of truth on the Travelers tab.
Intuitive Visual Language: Designed clear, icon-based displays for Booking Status (flight, hotel, car) and explicit tags for Invitation Status. (Not Invited, Invited, Accepted)
User Benefit: This provides immediate, at-a-glance visibility into every traveler’s progress, empowering admins to manage by exception.
Context-Aware Actions
Admins needed the right tools at the right time. The interface was designed to be intelligent and responsive.
Dynamic Tooling: We implemented contextual actions. The available options—like Invite, Re-invite, or Send Reminder—change dynamically based on a traveler's current status.
Robustness by Design: This simple, clean interface is built upon a deeply considered state-management system that gracefully handles dozens of user states and edge cases, ensuring the system is both powerful and reliable.
Pilot Success & Business Impact
Validating the market need and delivering measurable results that scaled from MVP to a core product offering
The pilot was a definitive success, validating the critical need for a system-managed approach to group travel and exceeding all initial goals.
Product Evolution: The successful pilot led to the feature evolving into a key "Additional Product," now marketed on our corporate website and instrumental in winning new client contracts.
Proven in Practice: We put the product to the ultimate test by using it to manage our own global offsite, "Converge 2024," seamlessly coordinating travel for hundreds of global employees.
Quantifiable Admin Efficiency: Achieved an average savings of 15 hours of manual administrative effort per week for each client who deployed the product.
Drastic Reduction in Errors: The guided flow resulted in a 90% reduction in booking errors compared to the previous manual process, ensuring compliance and saving costs.
From Events to Enterprise: Uncovering a Broader Challenge
How the success of our initial pilot with enterprise clients revealed the need for a more powerful, flexible solution for diverse, purpose-driven travel.
However,
the very success of the Event pilot, coupled with ongoing discussions with major clients like Amazon and Meta, began to illuminate its inherent limitations. We learned that "same dates" group events, while important, were just one specific scenario within a much broader spectrum of what we now call "Specialty Desk Travel."
Clients were asking: "This is great for our annual sales kick-off, but how do we manage travel for our new hire cohorts who start on different dates? What about candidate interviews, or individual intern travel, or specialized training programs like Amazon's Ops Learning Groups where parameters need to be highly individualized?"
This feedback validated that to truly serve large corporations, we needed to solve for a wider range of purpose-driven travel scenarios.
Inconsistent Processes & Complex Workflows
Our analysis of various specialty travel programs, such as those for Amazon's Ops Learning Groups, revealed that a one-size-fits-all approach was unworkable. The core challenge was the sheer diversity and rigidity of the processes themselves.
Fragmented Workflows: Each program operated with its own unique, multi-step flowchart and decision points, increasing cognitive load for agents and the risk of errors.
Conditional & Manual Approvals: Approval chains were often conditional, forcing agents to manually check for policy deviations before they could even initiate a request, causing significant delays.
Rigid and Non-Standard Rules: We encountered numerous hard-coded policy exceptions, such as "no Friday night stays" or mandatory booking channels for specific travel types, which required specialized handling outside of a standard system.
Fragmented Data & Varying Entitlements
Beyond the process, the data itself was highly fragmented. Key parameters and financial details changed frequently depending on the program or the individual, making standardization extremely difficult.
Variable Travel Parameters: Core entitlements like arrival/departure windows were not uniform, differing significantly between various programs.
Inconsistent Financial Coding: Financial data, such as cost centers and GL strings, were often hardcoded and varied by traveler role, complicating reporting and billing.
Manual Data Validation: A heavy reliance on manually checking external "Approved Traveler Lists" stored in tools like Smartsheet created inefficiencies and potential for data entry errors.
High Manual Overhead & Tooling Complexity
The day-to-day execution of these travel programs was characterized by a heavy reliance on manual tasks and a disconnected set of tools, creating a process that was both inefficient and prone to error.
Reliance on Manual Tools: The process depended heavily on tools like Smartsheet for requests and changes, creating a disjointed experience outside of our core platform.
Complex Payment Management: Coordinators had to manually manage multiple payment methods for a single trip (e.g., BTA for airfare, VPAY for hotels, Direct Bill for car rentals).
Repetitive Procedural Steps: The entire process, from request to reconciliation, involved numerous detailed and manual steps that a dedicated system could automate.
Workflow Comparison - Event vs. SPD Trip
Original "Events" Flow: The Rigid Approach
The initial pilot was a success for its intended purpose but had clear limitations when faced with more complex enterprise needs.
Monolithic Configuration: Admins were required to configure all trip details from scratch for every new event.
Homogeneous by Design: The entire flow was optimized for group travel where all participants shared the same dates and uniform parameters.
Inherent Limitation: This model was inefficient and could not scale to support travelers with individualized dates, policies, or needs.
Key Improvement Highlights
This new framework delivered significant, tangible improvements
Efficiency & Consistency: Drastically reduced repetitive work and ensured standard configurations by replacing manual setup with reusable templates.
Flexibility & Scalability: Unlocked the critical ability to manage travelers with individualized parameters at scale, directly addressing the core weakness of the old model.
Focused Coordinator Effort: Shifted the coordinator's role from tedious, full-scale configuration to quickly managing only the unique, trip-specific variables.
New "SPD" Framework: The Flexible, Template-Driven Solution
The SPD framework was designed specifically to overcome the limitations of the Events model by introducing a more scalable, two-layer architecture.
Reusable Templates: Program Managers can now define reusable SPD Templates for each specific travel purpose (e.g., 'New Hire,' 'Candidate'). These templates pre-configure core parameters like policy, payment methods, and booking modes (self-serve vs. arranged).
Focused Trip Instances: Coordinators select a template and create an individual SPD Trip. Their effort is focused only on inputting unique variables like the traveler's name and specific travel dates, not re-configuring the entire setup.
The Core Evolution
A Template-Driven Framework
To solve for the complexities of varied, purpose-driven travel, we introduced a template-driven framework. This new model fundamentally shifted the operational burden from repetitive, per-trip configuration to a more efficient process.
Evolution of Events
Real-time Monitoring
Enabled admins to monitor booking status in real time, providing up-to-date information on traveler progress and potential issues.
Phase #1 Genesis - Tesla's Need & Rapid Response
On my third day at Spotnana, I presented a demo to Tesla, addressing their need for efficient group travel booking. Our initial solution streamlined their workflow and tackled their manual booking challenges through rapid feature updates.
Guest Management
Simplified and refined the process of adding and managing guest information.
To accommodate increasingly complex scenarios, we shifted towards an SPD-style booking process. This allows admins to create reusable templates for various travel purposes, streamlining trip setup and reducing manual effort.
Phase #2 Expanding Scope - Recruitment & Diverse Use Cases
Based on Tesla's feedback and internal testing, we iterated on the design to accommodate broader use cases. This included features for recruitment scenarios, where HR teams needed to book travel for potential candidates outside the company system. This version introduced refined event management, diverse payment options, and expanded guest invitation capabilities.
Customization
Enabled customized event settings, including event images, allowed booking types, specific location details, and preferred airline options.
Payment: Introduced diverse payment methods to accommodate various booking scenarios.
Data Collaboration
Collaborated with the data team to implement event metadata tracking and a dashboard view of event lists for admins.
Phase #3 Spotnana Events - Internal Testing & Global Launch
To ensure the platform could handle large-scale events, we first deployed Spotnana Events for our own company-wide offsite in Dubai, with over 500 employees. After successful internal testing and refinement, we launched Spotnana Events as a global solution. This version simplified group travel for events with shared dates, limited booking types for better policy control, allowed for customized payment methods, and enabled easy traveler list management. It provided a streamlined booking experience for events worldwide, with features like customized email invitations and real-time booking status tracking. This success led to adoption by major clients like Meta, Amazon, and Walmart.
Global platform for managing events worldwide
Customized email invitations and real-time booking status tracking
Successfully deployed for large-scale events and adopted by major clients
Phase #4 Evolving into Specialty Desk Travel (SPD)
With growing demand and the onboarding of major clients like Amazon and Meta, the limitations of "Events" became apparent. It couldn't handle diverse traveler types, complex policies, and the need for more granular control. This led to the development of Specialty Desk Travel (SPD), a platform designed to manage intricate enterprise travel needs with enhanced flexibility, automation, control, and visibility. SPD introduced features like customizable templates for various travel types (e.g., new hire onboarding, relocations), streamlined trip creation, flexible booking options (self-service and agent-assisted), granular control over booking parameters, and comprehensive reporting.
I started by transforming the Events product to scale for other booking types. In the meantime, we also took this opportunity to implement Spotnana's new design system, which revamped our visual design. The SPD project is currently being implemented, and you can find more details in the next project section.
Summary
I led the design of Spotnana Events, a platform simplifying group travel booking for events of any size. I was passionate about creating an intuitive and enjoyable experience for both event planners and attendees, and I'm proud of the work we did to bring this product to life.
My contributions:
Led the design and development of the entire Spotnana Events product.
Championed user experience and design consistency.
Drove the implementation of Spotnana's new design system.
Played a key role in the successful adoption of the platform by major clients.