Role: Product designer

Context: Knowledge sharing

Duration: Feb 2015 - Aug 2016

My individual contribution

I co-founded VacayBug with Charles Hsieh and Khongor Enkhbold because of our shared passion for traveling and our mutual difficulty in pin-pointing the authentic and best locations that only locals know about. I managed the entire UI/UX for the web and iOS application. This project consisted of diving deeply into marketing, web optimization, responsive web development, iOS design guidelines, a bit of front-end development and usability testing. The majority of my time was spent on ideating with Charles and Khongor, the engineers, about potential features, focusing on building a minimum viable product for early adopters.

_______   CLIENT DETAILS

Understanding the idea.

About

VacayBug is about authenticity and ease of exploration. Create a “Passport” and document your favorite trips and favorite spots along the way. Then share those insights and recommendations with others while searching for unique places to explore yourself. By documenting your trips in your VacayBug Passport, you’re not only showing off where you’ve personally traveled, but you’re helping others skip the unfamiliarity and more easily find the experiences that you feel matter most for that destination.

Design challenge

How do we make traveling easier and more meaningful by building a digital product that allows a community of travel enthusiasts to share their travel experiences on VacayBug? 

Project tags

VacayBug Website

Visit home page

_______   KEY OBSERVATIONS

Asking the right questions.

Research goals

In the begining, it was a personal pain point of myself and the team. After conversing with several colleagues we realized that in order to make a successful product, we would need to interview more than just people of our age group. People travel for many reasons, and being able to pin-point the struggles of multiple persona types would allow us to reverse engineer a better travel experience. We put our research efforts into three specific areas of study: