Project
How might we design a feature for group collaboration?
About Vacasa
Vacasa is an accommodation sharing platform that hosts over 2 million guests a year and over 25,000 listings!
My Role
Project Manager & UX Designer, Research, Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping
Tools
Figma
Illustrator
Photoshop
Planning a trip with a group
Over the past month I discussed Vacasa’s trip planning experience with friends and colleagues of various backgrounds. From my interviews I learned that users enjoy planning trips with their friends. However, the current Vacasa experience does not satisfy their collaboration needs. Users mentioned that, in general, planning trips with other people is stressful because it requires communication and coordination.
While Vacasa has a share feature, many interviewees mentioned that they had no way to discuss group trips within the app. This illustrates that users do not know about the existing planning features. As a result, they were forced to discuss options within apps like Messenger. Moving the conversation off of Vacasa’s platform often led to confusion and miscommunication between travelers. The chat below shows an example of an interaction I had with a friend while planning a trip.
As shown above, we had to move our discussion to messenger. This step made it harder to compare our options in context. Here are the steps I personally had to take to plan a trip with friends.
- Share listing via SMS and find friends contact in the contacts list.
- Leave the Vacasa app and open messenger in order to give a quick description of the location.
- Click on listing my friend sent and review its description while mentally comparing it to previous options.
- After failing at the previous step, toggle back and forth between the Vacasa app and messenger to compare the two locations.
- Repeat each time we found a new listing.
Collaborative share feature
Though Vacasa has an existing share feature, it isn’t evident enough for users to know that it exists. Additionally, based on my interviews I noticed there were a few other shortcomings of the current collaboration experience.
Key takeaways
- It must be more intuitive to find the collaboration features. The current experience is hidden within the listings details, making it complicated to begin planning with friends.
- Users would like to discuss and compare their options in the app. Having easy access to property details would allow travelers to make more informed and accurate decisions.
- Current visual interface only allows users to see one property at a time which makes it hard to compare options.
- Adding a “split costs” feature to further assist the users with an intuitive user experience.
Using this information, I began to ideate on how I could improve the collaboration experience. I would like to acknowledge that I do not have access to Vacasa’s user-research data, and thus, the decisions I made were based on my limited user research and assumptions. In the future, I hope to use quantitative data to validate my design decisions.
Competitive analysis
I wanted to begin the research by looking at direct and indirect competitors of Vacasa, specifically Airbnb, Kayak’s trip huddle, Google trips, and Luna Moons. Personally, I find that competitor analysis helps me quickly identify progressive features, potential pain points, improvements, and other details.
I chose these companies because their products each had different motives and points of view, while still being in the same general category.
Online Research
Before jumping into user personas, I prefer to start with a simple user survey’s in order to generate a realistic representation of who our target audience is. I find that starting with some basic interview questions helped me focus and articulate my desired goal while keeping the user’s need in mind,
I utilized google forms to conduct my surveys and receive data. I surveyed 8 friends that I knew that utilizes these apps. When I was coming up with questions, I purposefully categorized them into 3 general sections:
1. General demographic and psychographic information (ie. Age, occupation, number of trips taken in the past year, number of people they typically travel with, etc.)
2. Details regarding their personal planning process (ie. How do they share housing details, who is typically in charge of planning, do they know what city they travel to before looking at housing, do they look to others before making bookings, etc.)
3. Details regarding their experience with Vacasa (ie. Do they prefer the mobile app or website, how could Vacasa make planning group trips easier, etc.)
From this, I was able to get an understanding of how people book trips, as well as locate a few different pain points. Some of the comments I received from the survey were:
For the user personas, I based them off of the demographic and preliminary questions from the survey. I find that for personas to be as advantageous as possible, it is important to support it with qualitative user information, specifically from the target audience.
I crafted 3 distinct personas, each with demographics, a bio, motivations, pain points, and other various aspects that bring these users to life.
I decided on utilizing journey mapping to illustrate and visually comprehend the typical user journey a user would go through in order to book a vacation for a group.
I chose to use one of my personas, Elia, as a representative of the planning / booking process. This mapping includes the steps for planning and booking, the user’s feelings, thoughts, and emotional state throughout the process. The scenario I used for Elia’s journey is the following:
"Elia is getting ready to embark on a week long vacation with her partners for their 5 & 2 year anniversaries. They are planning to go to Costa Rica, but aren’t sure about what they want to do or where they want to stay exactly. They’ve agreed to split all the costs and come up with a budget of $350 a night and $2,500 for cultural excursions."
Problem statement: How can we improve the current collaboration experience to allow users to make informed decisions within the Vacasa app.
Sketches
Normally around this time, many design ideas start floating around my mind. I find that sketching everything out and writing notes is the best way to organize my thoughts, even if I have an idea of the design I want to go with. I already knew I wanted to stay close to Vacasa’s designs in order to keep consistency.
Wireframes / Mockups
I started by wireframing all of my sketches, even the ones I was unsure about. I then started playing around with card shapes and sizes, iconography, placements, and other page elements.
I focused on the comparison page and created iterations to study how to best layout information in a visually and efficient way while also retaining a consistent look to Vacasa’s digital assets.
Ideation
Before jumping straight into finalizing the screens, I wanted to test my design assumptions with A/B usability testing and see the outcomes and other aspects I hadn't seen. Six colleagues were tested with the mid-fidelity wireframes.
A/B testing indicated that each design had its advantages and disadvantages. I then made a list of key insights which included the following:
What I learned
1) The first iteration with the simple list, helped participants scan information faster than individual cards.
2) Participants appreciated the list format for clarity of information. But they prefer the visuals and icons in a card format.
3) The final iteration was the most favored because of the visual consistency with the app.
Ultimately I decided to combine the two ideas by enabling the functionality of the list format, while retaining the visual casual aesthetic that was favored. Below is the translation prototype from low-fi to hi-fidelity.
1) Task Oriented Design integration
2) Comparing & Sharing for efficient coordination
3) Communication streamlined with built in group messaging & voting
4) Split Costs feature for seamless user experience
In terms of this project, future work would include validating my assumptions and designs through extensive testing based on Vacasa's internal data. In addition, I would love to see how I could integrate Vacasa Experiences into this interface. This would make the Vacasa app the only place friends have to visit when planning their entire trip!
I do not work for Vacasa. This is a challenge I decided to take on in order to build my knowledge and experience with Product/UX design. All decisions and designs are strictly my own.
