Deem Case Study

Award

Deem scored a 9.43 out of 10 on G2.com’s Travel Management Usability index based on authentic, unbiased, timely reviews from verified users. The Usability award includes criteria such as customer satisfaction in ease of use, adoption rates, and ease of admin.

Industry

Business Travel

Client

Deem is a mobile, cloud-based travel solution that allows corporate clients to manage their travel and create frictionless experience with over 20 years of history and 1.1 Billion $ spent annually.

• From the user's point of view, it enables you to book all segments of the trip within a few minutes, including air travel, hotel reservations, car rental, train tickets. From the point of view of business interests, the application combines a vast variety of both main external services for booking segments of a trip, and secondary ones for obtaining necessary information on assessing safety of the selected option or its impact on the environment.
• It also allows you to effectively use this service both for travelers themselves and for travel agents of companies, providing tools for fine-tuning many parameters for each account, delegating functionality between accounts, and a convenient desktop version with support for the simultaneous usage via multiple accounts.

The Deem project is successfully used by many major market players and receives positive feedback from users. The application is constantly evolving and receives functionality updates and various fixes twice a week. For example, in the near future, the application will have an updated settings and profile section, the functionality of train travel will be improved, and a new option to order a taxi through Deem application will appear. The development of the project is planned for years ahead and is constantly supplemented with new ideas and ambitious plans, including those based on feedback and wishes from users.

The development process begins with discussion and description of new functionality that will satisfy the needs of the business while enabling effective technical implementation of the plan. This is followed by planning phases - long-term and short-term ones, where the first one is used to build the order of implementation of major project innovations on a quarterly scale, and the second is to break innovations into specific tasks and stages for implementation and distribute them among teams within sprints.

Brilliant Contribution

Team Brilliant are building work processes in such a way as to take into account possible risks and force majeure circumstances while working on a project: a case when an employee leaves can always be compensated by a personnel reserve that can be supplied from other projects, the identification of hidden technical difficulties in the implementation of new functionality is compensated by competent planning taking into account additional time for such cases and additional polishing. Perhaps, one of the most important steps is launching the application for new customers or new areas of functionality (for example, such as booking train tickets). Especially for such periods, the Hypercare mechanism has been developed and successfully applied, when development teams are 24/7 on high alert to resolve emerging issues coming from customer feedback or, most frequently, long before that, with the help of competent error logging at different stages of the application working.

Team

The composition of the team directly working on the Deem project:

• 3 Frontend teams
• 1 Backend team

Each frontend team includes several frontend developers, team lead developer, product manager, QA engineers. Additionally, the work of the teams is moderated by an Agile coach to control and adjust work processes and interaction between teams.

Technology Stack

For monitoring: Splunk, Rollbar

For statistics collection: Google analytics, Heap.

Deem Functionality

While entering the Deem website, a user enters their login and password and reaches the main screen of the application. On the home screen, the user can search for flights, hotels, car rental services, book train tickets, and see a list of upcoming trips and service messages. From this page, one can also reach pages with a list of all upcoming trips, completed trips, canceled trips, as well as trips with the status “On Hold”, support page or user settings page.

Let’s assume the user is going to start booking a new trip by selecting flights. At first, one selects the trip format (Round Trip), the starting and ending point of the route (New York, USA -> San Francisco, USA), travel dates and preferred departure and arrival times (17-29 August, 6am-12pm, 6pm-12am):

After loading search results, the user can view the list of all flights with a brief description of the main parameters, fares and their bonuses / restrictions, see the details of flights with detailed information, check the location of free seats on the flight in advance, and also find out how environmentally friendly this flight is. Additionally, a wide range of filters is available to the user to more conveniently search for the desired flights using the quick filter panel and the window with all filters. Here you can quickly filter by airlines, airports, number of transfers, arrival and departure times, fare type, compliance with company policy:

The user can now select a return flight using the same screen with return flight search results:

After selecting a return flight, the user reaches review trip page - RTP. On this page, one can add additional trip segments (hotels, car rentals), see brief information on all trip segments, check the total cost of the trip, change its title, select seats on the plane if this has not been done before:

Let's assume the user decides to add a hotel booking to a trip and ends up on a search results page for hotels in San Francisco, USA. On this page, one can see a large list of hotels and use filters as well as an interactive map to find the right option. As filtering options are available, one can use the search radius around the selected location, the brand of the hotel (hotel chain), the number of hotel stars, and also choose the set of necessary amenities in the hotel. One can find a large number of hotel photos, reviews, details of rooms and rates, a list of hotel amenities, refund policies, the environmental level of the hotel location, and the safety index of the location in the details section of each hotel:

At the end, the user decides to add a car rental in San Francisco and, after searching for cars in the location, ends up on the search results page:

Here the user can filter the results by rental company, vehicle class, transmission type and fuel used. Additionally, in the car details modal window, one can find various parameters of the car, details of the company providing the car, breakdown by cost and total amount for the entire period, as well as details on the safety and environmental friendliness of the car:

After confirming the composition of the issued trip, the user enters the trip approval page (Checkout). Here the user can edit user data, preferences and bonus programs for air travel, hotels and car rentals, also view the details of the total cost of the trip, and enter or correct payment information. In some cases it may be necessary to enter additional data for the employer - the purpose of the trip, the data of the project and the department of the employee. As soon as it’s done, one can arrange a trip:

In case of successful booking of all segments of the trip, the user reaches screen confirming the successful booking of the trip. Here one can double-check all the trip data and find the confirmation numbers of the trip segments and the entire trip as a whole:

Then one can go to either to the main page of the application, or to the list of all trips:

As a user you can go into each trip and check the details. For instance, if you go to a trip you have just booked, you can find all the data with details for each segment of the trip, change the name of the trip, make changes to the booked segments, provided it is allowed by the booking conditions (delete segments, add new ones, change to similar ones, select seats on the plane), as well as cancel the entire trip:

This cycle represents the standard user experience while arranging a trip with different segments - flights, hotels, car rentals. You can also see a similar user experience for arranging the trip in the following video:

Conclusion

Deem is continually evolving to become an indispensable tool for travelers. Every aspect of designed interactions, including accessibility and usability is guided by the user's best interests.This drive leads to gaining an in-depth comprehension of its users, predict their worries, and surpass their anticipations.

Split deem case study into 2:

• Etta PWA (user experience)
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Storybook
• Work with design team
• Launch
• Awards in a business travel industry
• Deem generic case study
• Same format as Gearlaunch / Temporal