VayAway is an independent design project, and a business concept I created based on my discussions with second homeowners, as well as my experiences traveling to and living in popular vacation destinations. The Android mobile application is designed with Material Design guidelines in mind.
1. Most second homes/vacation homes are far away from their owner's primary residence. This distance complicates fairly easy tasks and makes them quite burdensome. Having a trusted local in the area to assist with these tasks would give owners peace of mind.
2. Living in popular tourist destinations can be difficult, as cost of living tends to be high and good work can be hard to come by. Having a flexible way to bring in extra income is very desirable.
For VayAway, there are two distinct core audiences. The first is the second home or vacation home owners, whom tend to be older and financially secure. The second is the individual who enjoys living in popular vacation destinations, but is in need of a flexible source of additional income.
User Researcher, UX/UI Designer
After writing up a Project Brief, outlining the required deliverables and building a timeline, I created a Research Plan for VayAway. From there, I dove into Secondary Research and analyzed the current landscape for second home owners and the competitors who are trying to meet their needs. You can review my Secondary Research findings here.
After conducting secondary research, I created two user interview scripts and started sourcing participants for user research interviews. For "Owners", I focused on second home/vacation home owners, which skewed older. For "Helpers", I focused on participants living in popular vacation home destinations that have worked a variety of different jobs in the area, and they skewed younger.
Now that I was more knowledgable about my "Owner" and "Helper" user groups, I used my learnings to create two personas in a Figma file. For the "Owner" user persona, I modified the approach so that it was for a married couple rather than one individual.
Prior to sketching and creating wireframes, I used FlowMapp to build out a user task flow, considering both the "Owner" and the "Helper" user and how and when their paths come together. You can view the first iteration here.
After receiving feedback on the user task flows for both the "Owner" and "Helper" personas, I implemented adjustments and built out the initial wireframes for the app design. Due to time constraints, I focused primarily on the key goals, like creating a task (Owner) and submitting an offer for one (Helper) rather than build out all pages.
Compared to previous projects, I took a different approach when establishing the Style Guidelines, largely to accommodate Material Design guidelines to the best of my ability for the Android application design. I found a Material Design focused community file in Figma which helped me create the baseline components (below), and outline typography, color scheme, elevation, and states.
Leveraging my wireframes and Material Design Style Guidelines, I created the high fidelity designs for the "Owner" and "Helper" UI. To provide differentiation between the two, I swapped the primary and secondary colors so that green was the primary color for "Helpers" and purple was the primary color for "Owners" with the other color utilized more sparingly.
With the first draft of my UI completed, I created a Usability Test Plan document that outlined my test objectives and the scenario tasks I wanted my participants to run through.
With my scenarios established I created the prototype in Figma for both the "Owner" and "Helper" user flows.
I conducted one in-person usability test, and for the rest of my participants I walked them through it remotely via Google Meet/Zoom depending on their preference. Upon completion, I created a comprehensive document that outlined my findings and 15 iterations I wanted to make based on priority.
