The Navan (pronounced “nuh-vawn”) platform provides cutting-edge travel booking & management and expense tools for business travelers and corporate travel administrators. As one of the first researchers to join their travel products team, I helped integrate evidence-based decision making into their product development processes, leading to accelerated revenue realization time and new initiatives for increasing travel booking revenue.

PROJECTS

Over 20 months, I conducted research studies on two main areas: establishing a foundational understanding of the corporate travel admin user and studio-style support for several product teams to refine existing business traveler user desktop and mobile experiences.

MY ROLE

UX Researcher

PROCESSES

Foundation Work: I collaborated with customer success, marketing, sales, product managers, and another researcher to map out the strategic product decisions to be made in the coming months in alignment with overall product vision. We defined what research questions we wanted answered and what type of corporate travel admins to target. Through several research studies, 30+ 1:1 contextual interviews, and multiple customer advisory board meetings we collected enough insight to develop a deeper understanding for Navan’s “customer,” the main decision maker who signs up for and renews accounts.

Studio Work: As research needs arose, I worked with product managers and designers throughout the company to develop a tailored research plan, participant profile, and timeline to solve their specific problem at hand. I worked closely with data scientists to analyze user types and identify prospective participants. Studies ranged from design evaluations, concept tests, surveys, usability tests, and rapid user feedback sessions.

OUTCOME

Foundation Work: Results of the corporate travel admin research was socialized throughout the organization through live and recorded presentations. Findings informed admin dashboard product roadmaps, new customer registration and UX, and enabled new Admin Products leaders to quickly ramp up. Time to onboard new small and medium sized business customers decreased from months to weeks.

Studio Work: Individual project findings were presented in a slide deck to relevant product teams and helped them to make critical decisions, such as on

• which design concepts to move forward on
• what are the most impactful changes to make to the business traveler’s booking UX
• what new initiatives would most increase hotel bookings