Made high-stakes fare configuration easier to review
Turned fragmented tools into one coherent workspace
Helped agents understand rule impact before saving
Created reusable patterns aligned with Travelport+
As Senior Product Designer, I redesigned its core workspace and key flows so agents could understand what each contract does at a glance, adjust intricate fare rules with more confidence, and avoid costly configuration mistakes.
By structuring the experience around a consistent, data-dense layout and reusable component patterns, I helped turn a fragmented set of expert tools into a more coherent and teachable product experience within the wider Travelport+ ecosystem.
Domain expert walkthroughs, product reviews, workflow mapping
Core hypotheses, risk points, user mental models
Unified workspace, information architecture, navigation patterns
Tables, forms, panels, review states, reusable UI patterns
Prototype feedback with stakeholders and domain experts
Pattern reuse across modules and closer Travelport+ alignment
“Designing for expert users means respecting complexity without letting the interface become the hard part.”
Smart Mark-up supports several fare-management capabilities, including Agency Private Fares, Calculated Contracts, Net Fare Manager, and Selling Fare Manager, all of which can be used together or independently. The challenge was not reducing capability, but making those capabilities easier to understand, safer to configure, and more teachable through the interface itself.
As Senior Product Designer at Travelport, I focused on turning Smart Mark-up from a set of powerful but fragmented expert tools into a single, coherent workspace for managing fare markups. I concentrated on the day-to-day reality of travel agents and revenue specialists, reshaping complex tables, flows, and rules into screens that clearly show what is happening and why.
By refining the layout, interactions, and component system in close collaboration with domain experts and engineering, I helped make high-stakes fare decisions more transparent, teachable, and efficient for the teams who rely on Smart Mark-up every day.
Smart Mark-up sits at the centre of how agencies shape margins across private, calculated, net, and selling fares, with workflows that can affect distribution and downstream pricing behaviour. When I joined the project, this power came with a cost: fare logic was exposed in a highly technical way, spread across multiple screens, and difficult for users to interpret without specialist knowledge.
Agents had to memorise business rules, move between tables and pop-ups, and manually cross-check details before saving changes. The risk of misconfiguring a contract was real, and teaching new colleagues depended too much on expert explanation rather than the product itself.
The first major design decision was structural. Rather than scattering functionality across multiple windows, I introduced a repeatable workspace pattern: a navigation area to move between modules, a central table for browsing and filtering fares, and a contextual detail panel to inspect and edit the selected item without losing the overall context.
This structure meant that an agent could filter down to a subset of contracts, select one, and work through its details while still understanding where they were in the bigger picture. It reduced unnecessary navigation and gave us a stable backbone that every module could share.
On the contract pages themselves, I treated the layout like a story. At the top, I surfaced a concise summary: which fares the contract touched, which markets and dates it applied to, and what kind of markup strategy was in play. Only after establishing that headline did the interface unfold into grouped sections for conditions, markups, and distribution.
By moving from narrative to detail, the UI helped experts audit intent and gave newer users a foothold in understanding complex fare logic.
For list views, I focused on making dense tables feel readable and useful. Columns were chosen to reflect how agents actually search, such as carrier, markets, dates, strategy, and status, rather than simply exposing every possible field.
Filters and search were aligned with the language users used in real workflows. Status chips and badges highlighted which contracts were active, close to expiry, or required attention, turning the list into more of a working dashboard than a flat index.
When an agent opened a contract, the page guided them through a natural order: understand the scope first, then adjust the logic. Grouping related rules and markups, and clearly separating “what we cover” from “how we change it,” helped reduce accidental edits.
Inline helper text and tooltips, written in collaboration with domain experts, translated technical fare concepts into something closer to the way users talk about real bookings.
Because a single misconfigured field can have a major financial impact, I put particular care into warnings, validation, and review moments. Instead of generic banners or hidden validation logs, issues appeared next to the relevant field or section, with distinct visual treatment for warnings versus blocking errors.
Before saving major changes, I designed a review state that summarised what was about to change so users could pause and double-check their decisions. This added friction where it mattered, without making the rest of the workflow feel heavy.
Smart Mark-up also needed to feel like part of a broader product ecosystem, not an isolated specialist tool. I defined and refined reusable patterns, including tables, filters, tags, panels, and dialogs, that aligned with Travelport+ and could be implemented as scalable building blocks with engineering.
Once these foundations were in place, designing new scenarios became less about inventing new UI and more about combining clear, consistent patterns.
Travelport's documentation shows that Smart Mark-up supports workflows around private fares, calculated contracts, and net fare management, with downstream integration into Travelport fare databases and distribution processes. That made product clarity especially important, because users were not just editing fields; they were shaping commercially sensitive fare outcomes.
While we did not publish external performance metrics, internal feedback was strong. Domain experts found it easier to walk new agents through contracts using the redesigned screens because the interface itself carried more of the teaching load.
For me, this project was a strong lesson in designing for expert users. It reinforced how crucial it is to respect their workflows and vocabulary, and how much value you can unlock simply by helping them see dense information in a way that matches how they think.
It also underlined the value of a thoughtful component system: once the core patterns were right, the team could move faster and with greater consistency, even as the product continued to grow in complexity.
