Verified to Rewarded: A UX-Integrated Design Case Study of an AI-Prototyped Enterprise Travel and Reimbursement Application
Ruchi Gaur Chirayu Tongra · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
Corporate travel and expense reimbursement inside large professional-services firms still runs on a fractured sequence of tools: a travel booking portal, a separate expense-report form, a manager's inbox, and a payroll cycle that arrives weeks later with little visibility into what was approved and why. This paper documents the design rationale, research grounding, and prototyped interface of an internal KPMG mobile application that collapses this sequence into one verified, end-to-end flow, in which an employee's official trip is confirmed before any spend is logged, and every eligible flight, train, hotel, food, or fuel bill tied to that trip is automatically tracked toward a single redeemable amount credited to salary. The design approach combined a human-centred design cycle (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test) with an AI-native, conversational prototyping workflow, sometimes termed vibe coding, in which high-fidelity mobile screens were generated, reviewed, and iterated through natural-language direction rather than manual interface construction alone. Findings from the surrounding literature indicate that perceived security and system transparency, rather than ease of use alone, are the strongest predictors of trust and honest disclosure in electronic reimbursement systems, that optical character recognition can remove the friction of manual receipt entry without removing the need for a human verification checkpoint, and that visible progress and reward framing measurably increase engagement with financial tools when applied without encouraging risk-taking. Practically, the resulting design demonstrates how a trip-verification gate, a transparent redeemable-amount tracker, and an auditable approval trail can be combined into a single interaction pattern suited to enterprise deployment. The originality of this work lies less in any single screen than in the integration itself: existing literature treats travel booking, expense OCR, reimbursement trust, and AI-assisted interface generation as separate problems, whereas this case study treats them as one connected user journey and demonstrates, through a working AI-prototyped artifact, that they can be designed and built together by a small, mixed-skill team.