Tour Ops Pro
User Experience Flows, UI Design, Sketch Prototype, Invision, Design System, Project Management
Manage and plan massive tour trips.
Trip operators create itineraries, proposals, trips, book suppliers, and get paid by passenger groups. Passengers can easily register for their trips, sign travel documents and customize their experience.
Idea and User experience
Tour Ops Pro is the logistics software of Green Light Tours.
The company organizes tours for high schools. One specific trip can involve hundreds of kids, different tour guides, tons of suppliers, among others.
Their pain point? They were organizing all these tours by hand and excel sheets. They were growing fast and bringing more members to the team but it was difficult to keep all information synced.
Their goal was to expand across the United States but it was clear to them that they needed to automate the process in order to achieve expansion.
This system is very robust and it entailed different applications, sections and users.
The two applications are the CRM and the Passenger Registry.
The different user levels are Admin (Access to everything but only read Accounting section), Tour Coordinator (Access to Passenger Registry Application), Accountant (Access to Invoices and Accounting), Passengers (Access to Passenger Registry front end), Super Admin.
For the simplicity of this Case Study we will cover only the Trips section from our CRM application. Targeted to Admin users.
The Trips section is where all aspects of the Trip are coordinated. It involves many aspects that are very sensitive. The subsections of Trips are Overview, Itinerary, Packages, Suppliers, Passengers, Worksheet, Invoices and Contracts.
USER INTERFACE DESIGN.
In inherited a design style from a previous version of this application. The application had already been started when I arrived to the project and the client wanted to improve it little by little without having to do a complete redesign of style.
The color and font are corporate and sober. These needed to work well for people that are used to work with business software and solutions but not necessarily power internet users. We also needed contrast as it was important for users to easily read and input all information. The font used is Arial which is pretty standard and universal.
As the application grew and more developers joined the team the need to create a design system and keep components standard was eminent.
I created a basic design system where I defined the main components of the application. I based these sections on the Atomic Design methodology Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, Templates and Pages. The components defined were Colors, Typography, Buttons, Inputs Textareas and Radio Buttons, Graphic Elements, Icons, Alerts and Popups, Navigation, Filters, Forms, Tables, Table Layouts.
PROTOTYPE AND IMPLEMENTATION.
This prototype was created in Sketch and Invision. These tools were perfect for collaborating with the rest of the team.
I worked on each feature directly with the GreenLight team which were the actual users of the applications. I listened to their pain points and suggested solutions. After designing these I would demo the flows to the team, saw them interact with the prototype and adjusted accordingly. Once the feature and flow was approved I would create a workflow demo for the development team and helped the project manager write the necessary user stories, breaking down the features to tasks the team could implement in weekly iterations.
Once the features and flows were implemented I helped the QA team approving the front end implementations.
This is a Ruby on Rails application. The front end is implemented in React. The application integrates with Quickbooks to sync the business’ accounting and handles payments with Stripe.
The Tour Ops Pro is a complete success. It has helped the GreenLight team coordinate hundreds of trips and thousands of passengers. Process thousands of dollars in payments. The team is more comfortable in the accuracy of their Proposals and Trips costs. The sky is the limit now for Green Light team’s possibilities of expansion.
