Company settings

It started as an audit and turned into creating a list of features for a whole new platform that consolidates company set up and user management.

Background + context

The problem.

In late 2020, TripActions began early conversations with Enterprise companies (global organizations with thousands of employees) – a new segment of customers we hadn’t supported before. Where would our product break? How might we design these experiences for scalability?

The solution.

After a product audit and several customer interviews to understand Enterprise needs and how this differs from our current customers, we identified that user management, feature permissions, and policy were key components that needed to be rethought for the complex structure of enterprise companies.

The team.

1 product director/manager
1 senior product designer + collab with other product teams
1 FE, 1 BE

The timeline.

Research began in Dec 2020
Problem and scoping defined by Jan 2021
MVP designs handed off mid Feb 2021
Future designs created and ready by Mar 2021
Currently still in staged implemention (Jun 2022)

The audit

From the audit and some usability sessions, we identified some issues with our current experience:

Discoverability was difficult to get to the appropriate section (kitchen-sink of links in Profile dropdown)
Comprehension + impact: users were confused why there are multiple places for the same information (displayed differently) and unsure of when changes in one area impacts the other (or if they do)
Existing experience anchors to editing one-by-one from an all-in-one table – which breaks for companies or teams that are larger than 400 people (also requires a lot of upkeep)

Different needs

Additionally, during customer interviews we started to see the different needs we would have to accommodate between Enterprise customers and our current small-medium sized businesses. The complexity of the organization, the dynamic variability, etc. all had to be accounted for to scale effectively.

A new platform

to rule them all (jk)

At the time, TripActions and TripActions Liquid had 2 different admin experiences to support the two products: one for travel management, the other for expenses. However, all of our customers were a single source – they didn’t see these as two completely different tools and the redundancy of user management, policy, and permissions – which are set up when the company onboards – was confusing. Our solution? A single platform that would house these joint tasks (setting up a company) as the source of truth.

We scrapped the old all-in-one user table where most of the columns could be editable. Instead, we proposed a user table that served as the metadata to define groups of employees. This became the foundation for how rules-based assignment could be executed across travel & expense policies as well as permissions.
Within the new user table, we also introduced the ability to create new groups. When companies onboard, they sync their HR systems to add all their employees; but after numerous conversations with customers (of different sizes), it was clear all customers needed additional levers to categorize their teams. As companies were larger and more decentralized, this would also influence how permissions to different features would be granted.
In the old world, our feature access and permissions fell into a binary: you either have it or you don’t. In the new world, we needed to provide more granularity: which parts of the experience could someone access? Which data should be fed into those experiences? How do we make this accessible to whole teams — where employees might come and go?
A by-product of the earlier audit also revealed the issue of our inconsistent navigation across platform and products. We needed to consolidate and streamline. This meant providing more intuitive and unified navigation models.

Company details

The platform starts off with shared information across travel & expenses – the components a company fills out when their account is set up.

User table

The user table that now serves as the metadata for all employees/users of a company’s TripActions account. We introduced custom categories that can be an additional layer of grouping and hierarchy for defining employees.

Custom categories

Interviews with several enterprise and SMB businesses revealed that organizations needed a dynamic way to add additional categories to their employee base. The categories can be used in rule-based assignment for policies and feature permissions. For a V1, we’ve limited the number of custom categories to 4 groupws. Each category can have an unlimited number of values.

Feature access

Within the Users group there are 3 subsections: user table (metadata for categories), custom categories, and permissions. Permissions addresses the type of access employees have to different parts of the TripActions Admins experience or delegate access (ability to book for other people & view their information). Feature access is for enabling groups or individuals to the Admin experience for specific purposes; ie the Finance team may need access to booking reports on a monthly basis – but they should also be limited to the correct scope of the company (UK only sees its associated region, not the whole company).

All the control

While customers set policies on a user-level, there is also the desire to set safety and cost controls at the destination-level. We added more fine-tuned levers for trip proposals, approvals, and who might be required to have these. For instance, employees based in India might not need these guides, but employees from other offices/regions would.

Where it is now…

While designs had been completed and handed off in March 2021, engineering implementation on the front-end started in Dec of 2021. The policy part of the work was implemented at a v1, to help provide the transition from a generalized bucket system to a rules-based, employee categorized version. The rules-based system has yet to be implemented due to its dependency on the user management revamp.

As of now, Jun 2022, user management is still ongoing. In future iterations, the Travel Admin team will be improving its Settings section for more intuitive categorization and improved usability and comprehension. For the policy experiences, we are actively iterating on the next evolution since TripActions has prioritized self-onboarding and customization. We’re learning more with each round of cohorts that set up their accounts (without our historic walk-through and set up from Customer Success Managers).