A clearer route to safer business travel.

01The challenge

A protective service with a difficult path to access.

Secure Ground Transportation, or SGT, supports employees travelling on business to high-risk locations. Political unrest, severe weather, and epidemics can make a reliable transfer an essential part of a trip. The product had to help people arrange that service while giving the Travel Risk Management team, or TRM, enough information to coordinate it.

Until 2022, employees from senior leaders to individual contributors used a lengthy intake form and waited an average of 36 hours for approval. They often reached the application without knowing the acceptance criteria. A form submission began a coordination process rather than giving the traveller a clear route to confirmation.

The problem was shared by two audiences: travellers trying to arrange a trip and the operations team interpreting requests, handling questions, and working with transportation providers. Improving one screen would not be enough if the manual work around it stayed the same.

02My role

Bring business, engineering, and traveller needs into the same conversation.

I led the design work from research and conceptualisation through usability testing and developer handoff. My partners included the TRM business manager and team, a technical project manager, a UX lead, a tech lead, and two software development engineers.

I started by bringing TRM and engineering into the same discussions. We examined the business challenges, technology gaps, delivery constraints, and opportunities to improve the service. This was important because the experience depended on operational rules and coordination as much as interface design.

Together we framed the goals: simplify booking and request management, reduce manual coordination, improve communication, and help travellers understand when and how to use SGT. These goals provided a basis for deciding what belonged in the MVP.

03Discovery

Map the journey before rewriting the form.

With TRM and engineering, I arranged interviews with past travellers and mapped the existing customer journey. The mapping captured stages, goals, frustrations, motivations, and the points where people needed help. It helped connect a traveller’s uncertainty to the extra work arriving in the operations team’s queue.

The important questions were practical. Could someone establish whether their destination was covered before entering the full itinerary? Could they understand the status of a request without contacting support? Could they change or cancel a booking themselves?

These questions became design opportunities and helped define scope and success measures. They also kept the work focused on the whole request lifecycle: create, view, update, and cancel.

04Design decisions

Make the service understandable before asking people to commit.

Across more than five brainstorming sessions and over ten scope and design iterations, I worked with the team to balance impact, feasibility, and future scale. The resulting direction brought eligibility, booking, and request visibility into a connected journey.

05Validation & delivery

A user-validated MVP, tested in a controlled pilot.

More than five usability studies informed the final MVP. The delivered experience covered first-time guidance, a request dashboard, destination selection, eligibility feedback, booking details, and cancellation. Some opportunities were deliberately held for later releases to keep the initial scope feasible.

The booking details supported traveller information and multi-city requirements. Save as draft was useful for people who needed to return to a request. The dashboard and self-service actions gave the booking a clear state beyond submission.

The MVP began with a controlled pilot in one country before scaling globally. This gave the team a bounded setting in which to learn about the product and its operational handoffs before extending the service.

06Outcomes

Less waiting, less uncertainty, and less support work.

Average time from initial request to confirmation fell from 36 to 18 hours, a 50% reduction in elapsed service time. More than 80% of low-risk requests received approval within 15-30 minutes, reducing manual TRM intervention.

Unique travellers booking SGT increased by more than 30%. Support enquiries related to booking confusion, pricing, and eligibility fell by more than 50%. These outcomes connected the interface changes to both traveller adoption and the operations team’s workload.

07Lessons & next steps

The MVP improved booking. The journey still continued outside it.

The first release exposed where the next investment should go. Our reflections became a new set of user stories for access, integration, and communication.