Experience Design at Evolve VR
Senior Product Designer - Guest Pre-Booking
Evolve Vacation Rentals is a company that serves VR Guests, Owners, and Partners in order to create a seamless vacation rental experience.
As a Senior Product Designer leading the Guest Pre-Booking section of Evolve’s digital platform, my responsibilities are focused on interfacing with guests through surveys, interviews, and session recordings. Using these findings, I work with senior leadership and project management teams to design and prioritize user experience optimizations and new features, with the goal of improving guest experience.
My main responsibilities as Senior Product Designer are the Evolve homepage, all search results, property listing pages, and checkout flow, as well as supporting the creation of the Evolve Design System.
For the guest-facing pages, I present survey data and interview findings directly to Evolve’s senior leadership team, and determine what projects warrant prioritization. Following data gathering and fact finding, I wireframe new designs, share prototypes, and work with developers, project managers, and engineers to build new features and optimize the end-to-end user flow from discovery to conversion. Under my design leadership, I helped implement numerous enhancements to the Evolve digital ecosystem including a more intuitive booking calendar, similar property highlight component, sitemap with breadcrumbs, redesigned property viewer, and numerous payment enhancements including Apple Pay and Affirm functionality. These projects helped fuel guest conversion, as well as improved site accessibility.
The Evolve Design System is the full reimagining of Evolve’s branding, website tooling, and architecture to unify each pillar (Guests, Owners, and Partners) within one design language. My role within the Experience Design team is to provide support in the form of providing direction for the design system’s goals, as well as building and presenting usage guidelines, best practices, and designing anatomies for multiple digital components of the site.
Booking calendar enhancements
The Evolve booking calendar is one of the most important components in the guest-facing portion of the site. It enables users to explore which dates are available, which are blocked by owners, and what stipulations must be met for a successful date selection.
Previous versions of the calendar did not meet accessibility standards, and the user could encounter up to six separate, distinct error messages after submitting a date selection request. I conducted both moderated and unmoderated tests that compared Evolve’s calendar system to those in use at Google, AirBnb, and Vrbo to understand which calendar features were most important to guests as they progressed from trip planning to trip booking.
Based on my research, I identified several essential features that would accompany a redesign of the calendar and its architecture. These included start and end indicators for blocked days, which would make afternoon check-ins clearer to guests, dynamic bolding of dates to communicate minimum stay requirements, and tooltips to handle errors well before submission of a date set.
As a result of these changes, errors in calendar input was reduced by 38%, and trended downward as tooltips taught users how to avoid selecting unavailable dates.
Payment Elements
Another major milestone I lead at Evolve was the integration and design of third party payment elements, as well as the re-platforming of the payment handler as Evolve became the Merchant of Record for bookings.
I worked with developers and designers to implement Stripe as Evolve’s payment handler, as well as Apple Pay and Affirm as alternate payment methods. This included top of funnel calls to action, payment estimation, Affirm integrations on listings, checkout flows, and support pages, as well as error flows and edge case handling.
It was important to work closely with the Affirm and Stripe teams to ensure that branding elements were preserved, as well as to create seamless designs for a new component on the Evolve page. These integrations are also extremely important as they make vacation rentals more accessible to guests, by breaking up the payments into more manageable pieces.
