Background
In September 2021, I was approached by a Product Manager I had collaborated with in the past. He had recently co-founded a new startup, AWAI, with a mission to revolutionise the way people dream of, plan and book their vacations. Currently, travel platforms operate within a highly rigid framework, primarily driven by antiquated logistics booking systems.
To use these platforms effectively, users are required to have a precise itinerary in mind, including travel dates, duration, and destination. However, a considerable gap exists between a user's initial desire to visit a place and the practical logistics of planning the trip. People often find themselves navigating various external sources such as Pinterest, Instagram, magazines, blogs, and YouTube to seek inspiration and information about destinations, accommodation, and local attractions. Rather than having to know the details of a vacation before you book, we wanted to bring the experience of exploration into the AWAI Platform. If I want to see which destinations have surfing but are also family friendly with a kids club and are available over school summer holidays. AWAI would be able to surface a whole bunch immersive of options for me. AWAI aims to bridge this gap and create a more flexible and explorative travel booking experience.
Challenge
We had nothing more than an idea and a compelling pitch deck; there was no product, and certainly, no design in place. To transform our vision into a tangible reality, we decided to collaborate with a Ukrainian development firm to help us create the minimum viable product (MVP). My role was to delve deep into the end-to-end design solution that would ultimately shape our product's identity and user experience.
Working closely with the dev team in Ukraine we negotiated the challenges that faced us matching the API call data we receive from antiquated travel services to build the ideal experience for our end user. We eventually would have to pull in a plethora of services to be able to serve the ideal flexible experience.
Broad Strokes
A fascinating aspect of this work is there is no product to iterate from. Working collaboratively with the co-founders and the Dev team in Ukraine, I sketched and refined their vision. We spent a considerable amount of effort to flush out what an explorative and flexible experience looks like. The Co-founders had amassed a lot of knowledge about the travel booking with their experience in the industry and my challenge was to translate that knowledge into working product.
The Co-founders had raised some funds for the business, that money had been focused on build the product. There was no budget for qualitative user research or testing. What I could learn about the the Travel space I did in a bootstrapped manor. Looking through travel blogs, instagram, forums, booking platforms for insights and competitor analysis was the extent of my domain research. As for Product testing I leaned into friends, family and neighbours who matched our target group of young professionals with children.
Design
It only made sense to use an existing design system to have a foundation to build from and keep development time to a minimum. I chose Material Design for it’s breath of components, documentation, ease of use and it’s ubiquity on the web. Using a system that is so well known could be seen as a disadvantage for brand differentiation, but I argued because the platform will be new experientially to end users it is best to make it as familiar as possible.
On top of Material design I built a working visual language. Colour was a very important aspect of this project and wanting to stay away from a lot of ocean blues and sunset hues that many travel platforms use but using travel imagery as inspiration we settled on gentle greens as a base and secondary colours and opting for a bright fuchsia as the action/accent colour.
Now that a foundational design system is in place, I began the process of transforming the wireframes and user experience into a fully interactive and visually appealing interface. My primary focus was to streamline and enhance the exploration functionality, making it more intuitive and user-friendly. I also dedicated attention to ensuring that the extensive amount of information available for each destination is presented in a concise and easily understood manner, allowing users to quickly grasp the key details at a glance.
Outcomes
After three months of hard work and nearing the completion of my contract, I successfully delivered an end-to-end experience and established a design system that served as a strong foundation for the development team to build upon. As a result of our efforts, today awai.com.au is live and actively growing in the market, steadily gaining momentum and attracting more users.
