Evoke Website
Evoke is Australia’s first zero emissions luxury chauffeur service with a fleet of Teslas, operating in Sydney and Melbourne. I have been working with them since they launched in 2015.
As the company grew and evolved, there was a need for a new website with more detailed information about their services and a better booking system.
Instant Quote Widget
One of the most common enquiries the Evoke team receives is regarding the pricing of their service. The instant quote widget on the home page allows customers to see straightaway the estimated final fare based on location, time and vehicle type.
Automated Booking System
On the first version of Evoke’s website customers were able to submit a booking request and bookings had to be processed manually by the customer service team. The new booking system is fully automated and payments are processed immediately with Stripe or Apple Pay.
Evoke Booking Portal
As a lot of Evoke’s customers are corporate clients there was a need for a better way to process regular bookings. A lot of EA’s often look after multiple executives and need to manage multiple bookings at a time.
I helped Evoke design a booking platform that allows customers to create, edit and cancel ground transport bookings easily for multiple travellers. Other features include viewing the driver details and car location (within one 1h of the booking time) and the ability for EA’s to share traveller profiles with colleagues in the event they are away, so someone else can manage that person’s travel requirements.
The creation of the Booking Portal not only brought a lot of benefits to customers but also reduced a lot of overhead for Evoke’s customer service team, since bookings had to be processed manually before and now the whole process is fully automated.
Evoke Travel
Following from the creation of the ground transport booking portal Evoke identified yet another problem corporate EA’s faced, booking interstate and international travel for their managers.
And from there, Evoke came up with the idea to create a corporate travel booking platform.
Research
In order to validate and understand the problem we had to speak with some of our potential customers first. We started with a survey which was sent out to multiple EA’s in various consultancy firms with whom Evoke had existing relationships, to validate if a similar problem occurred in different companies.
From there, we moved to qualitative research and set up 1:1 interviews with 4 different EA’s to dig deeper into some of those problem areas and understand their pain points and goals.
Main insights
Planning/Booking travel is a time-consuming process for EA’s
Depending on the type of travel that needs to be booked, flights, ground transport and hotels may need to be organised. There is no existing platform which can be used to booked all services at once. They need to get quotes from multiple places before deciding to book and then manually create an itinerary for their managers.
There’s no training for this
Most EA’s don’t actually have a process in place for booking travel, it’s usually an ad-hoc thing. Some companies may have an in-house travel team, however oftentimes they’re unable to book all required travel components, ground transport as an example.
When changes occur it can be a problem
Executives might end up missing a flight, or they might make flight changes without communicating with their EA. One change may affect other components of the trip, and multiple things will need to be updated in multiple places.
Customer journey map
Using the research insights we identified the different stages in the user’s journey: Onboarding, planning, booking, changing/monitoring. I then moved on to creating a customer journey map, outlining the current state, pain points and future goals.
Initial concepts
I started by creating wireframes for all the main use cases.
Once we were happy with the structure I moved on to low fidelity mockups, using the existing Design System I had created previously for Evoke’s other product, since we wanted to move fast. I then created a clickable prototype using Invision which we put in front of a few EA’s for usability testing.
The initial prototype included a dashboard with a list of trips, a booking form where users can enter all the travel details and a page where they can review all trip details and confirm the booking.
More insights and beta testing
The initial designs were very well received and we were able to uncover even more insights which helped shape the product better.
From there, the product has evolved a lot and moved on to beta testing. Some of the core new features are:
Search results with travel options
Users can search for trips based on the time they want to leave, or time they want to arrive. And from there, multiple trip options are displayed so they can make the appropriate decision.
Itineraries can have multiple trips
A lot of times executives may make multiple consecutive trips. Having a consolidate itinerary makes it easier for them to see all their travel plans in one place.
Users are able to create “incomplete” itineraries and add components later on
EA’s may not always know which travel services will need to be booked for a trip. We wanted to allow them to create “incomplete” itineraries so they have the option to add extra components later on if needed.
Ability to manage multiple travellers and set default travel preferences
EA’s often manage travel requirements for multiple travellers. Each traveller may have their own travel preferences which are then applied automatically in the trip search.
Traveller companion app
In addition to the web-based tool which will be primarily used by EA’s to book and manage travel Evoke realised they also needed to cater to another use case.
Oftentimes travellers may need to make last minute changes to travel plans and may not have enough time to communicate with their EA’s to request a change. These travellers are busy executives who would need to make changes on the go. A common thing would be changing the pick up time or location, and sometimes even changing flights.
Evoke decided to create a companion mobile app where travellers are able to see all their upcoming trips and make changes to individual travel components if needed.
