1. Stake Holder Interviews

In the research process, the first step was to understand the goals of the company, and the vision that the CEO and executive team had. I conducted 1.5 hour interviews with 5 people, and learned the mission of the company and brand, and dug deeper into what they thought the product should accomplish for the business, and how they viewed their audience.

2. User Interviews

I interviewed 12 people and listened to how they thought about travel, how they traveled, and what place it had in their lives. It was fascinating to hear very personal perspectives and to get a glimpse into people's personalities. I really realized then that these people don't “vacation”, they love experiencing the world as locals do and it was part of their identity.

3. Persona creation and mental model process

I followed a strict process to craft personas based on the interviews. First I transcribed the interviews, then underlined things that stood out. I then sorted the quotes or the comments by subject matter, and created a spreadsheet of these themes that informed the personas and the mental mode process chart. 

4. Product Strategy

The findings made clear a recurring problem that people solved in their own way for all stages of a trip: to organize information to plan for a trip, to follow an itinerary of things to do during a trip, and then to make recommendations to friends after the trip. The product strategy was to make list-making and organizing easier. This is in 2011, and predates all of the "curated" lists we see today (really)!

5. Interaction to save a recommendation to a list

6. Visual design