8November 2020IN MY OPINIONMOBILE TECHNOLOGY ENRICHING DIGITAL TRAVEL EXPERIENCE Like all good innovation, our mobile journey started eight years ago in a gastropub, with wire frames drawn on a napkin and the idea to enhance the travel experience through an app. We built on this initial idea, constructed in that dim-lit pub, to set an initial scope for our mobile plan: to create a strategy to digitize our traveler itineraries. Remember the piece of paper you carried around to see all the details of your trip? We wanted to eliminate that. In addition to digitizing the itinerary process, the ultimate goal was to create an exceptional mobile product, where we travel with you, wherever you're going. At that time, mobile apps were still new. Our original product was builtin native mobile language to support Blackberry, Windows, IOS and Android. As you can imagine, we had challenges along the way, such as understanding the user experience for each type of device, creating seamless app flow based on `how' the traveler uses the app and even if we needed to support diminishing technology. However, even with these challenges, we invested in this development process because it gave us the flexibility to listen to our client's needs and make feature and functional developments as needed. To transform our business and make an impact on our industry, we needed to ensure the user experience and user interface were appealing, easy to use, had simple navigation and offered added value to the traveler. We utilized one of our partners, a leading research and consulting company, to help conduct user studies and surveys. We picked 100 travelers of various types (road warrior, novices, etc.) and observed them By Michael Kubasik, Executive Vice President & CIO, Travel & Transport, Inc.
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