0 - 1 Mobile App and Low-Code Web Design Case Study
Haven was a 0 - 1 concept that the design team explored and a project that l took over at Vacasa as designer and researcher.
Vacasa is a tech-enabled full service short term rental management company. In other words, they help vacation home owners get bookings and they help to clean and maintain the home, and provide guestcare so homeowners can sit back and watch the revenue come in.
A service like this comes at a premium price tag - and business was booming during COVID as travelers avoided hotels, however, the market corrected when hotels became busy again. To complicate matters, many investors had put their money into short term rental real estate, so the market was also oversaturated. In summary, there were fewer travelers wanting to book these homes and more homes that needed to be filled. This combination of factors made it extremely challenging for existing homeowners to make the kind of revenue they were used to making in years past. Homeowners were looking for ways cut corners and save money, but, unfortunately, many ended up needing to sell their vacation homes. To some, it may seem like a posh problem, but to many of these homeowners, their home represented their family and a place where everyone could come together once or twice a year to create life-long memories. To others, the income from the vacation home was used to fund their retirement, and the market wreaked havoc on their dreams and future. Enter Haven.
Context
Foundational Research
The beautiful thing about foundational and generative researcher is that it just keeps on giving. Earlier in my tenure at Vacasa, while approaching a different problem, I designed and conducted a mixed methods study to better understand our owners.
Approach: I conducted 15 interviews with 3 segments of homeowners to identify needs and pain points. I translated the needs into needs statements then sent out a Jobs-to-be-Done style survey to 500 Vacasa homeowners to gauge the importance and satisfaction of each need. From this data I crafted a full report and an “Owner Needs Model” to help decision makers prioritize and make better, more user centric decisions.
Key Insight 1: From my user research, we noticed an emerging need from a clever segment of homeowners: They wanted full service but instead of hiring Vacasa to take care of their home and bookings for them, they were creating their own quilt-work of of preferred vendors, such as cleaners, maintenance folks, and sometimes a 3rd party booking vendor, that way, they could still get “full service” management, but didn’t have to pay a premium and they could work with only the vendors they knew and could trust.
Key Insight 2: Creating a personal network of vendors may seem like a no-brainer, however, doing it this way can create a logistical nightmare for owners that are too busy to be constantly taking calls from guests, cleaners, maintenance teams, etc.
Problem Statement
When homeowners try to patch together their own property management team, communications and logistics becomes more complex, cumbersome, and time consuming.
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Design Process
The design process can be messy but below is a summary of the steps that I took to create designs for Haven.
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We had to determine if these ideas were feasible and viable to our business. To do that I had multiple sessions with stakeholders and we decided that our main question was initially on feasibility: Could we grow a network of nationwide vendors that could support operations?
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First I identified what I thought to be the primary user flows. This was not a long process, though it was important because it determined the screens that needed to be designed for our concept test.
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Upon completion of this phase of the process I created and presented a report to stakeholders.
Outcome
Short term rental management, cheaper and easier.
(or keep scrolling to view the case study.)