Business Travel Initiatives Across Mobile & Web
Design contributions across request, booking, and in-trip management
Role&Scope
Business travel initiatives (Mobile + Web)
This case study summarizes main business travel initiatives I designed on the ByteDance Travel team, delivered at different times but under the same constraints: policy compliance, approval efficiency, and travel decision-making.
I grouped them to show how I design end-to-end enterprise workflows across mobile and web, for both travelers (applicants) and approvers.
Challenge
Recurring patterns in business travel
- Flexibility vs compliance: trips change often, but policy and approval rules must stay enforceable.
- Two mental models: travelers optimize for speed + control; approvers optimize for clarity + risk reduction.
- High decision effort in booking: hotel choice needs location context, but default map UI can be noisy and inconsistent in an internal product.
Solution
1. Mobile Trip Request: Structured itinerary planning with low editing friction
Goal:Increase approval clarity by requiring travelers to specify daily schedule per city (time + work plan), instead of a single date range + generic reason—so approvers can better judge necessity and reduce unnecessary spend.
Key UX decision: This added input is unavoidable, so I focused on making edits fast and non-blocking. I introduced drag-and-drop itinerary cards to let users reorder trip segments without re-entering details.
Impact:
- Adoption: 31.02% of employees, 22.68% of requests
- Estimated annual savings: 146M RMB
- Satisfaction: 4.98/5
2. Web Hotel Booking: Map-based decision support near company location
Goal: Help employees choose hotels faster by adding spatial context to the booking flow.
Key UX decision: Designed a map + list experience where the map supports comparison and confidence (not just "a map view").
Highlight: Making Google Maps feel first-party (Map Styling)
Default Google Maps UI felt visually external and too dense. I validated feasibility and applied custom map styling as part of the product UI system:
- Decomposed map elements into points / lines / areas
- Defined what to keep vs remove for the "near company site" scenario
- Mapped remaining elements to the internal color palette for consistency + scanability
Impact:
- Shipped web hotel map 0→1 for 100K+ employees
- 24% of orders influenced by map search
- Booking flow time reduced by 9% (~9s)
- Satisfaction: 4.82/5
@ 2026 Claire Han