A Traveled Path Homes
Client Overview
A Traveled Path Homes, Inc. is a tech start-up in the housing/lodging industry, offering a solution to healthcare employers and educational institutions who are challenged with finding safe, affordable and convenient lodging for their contracted staff and students.
The Challenge
A Traveled Path Homes is looking to solve a common problem amongst all contracted traveling professionals– securing safe and comfortable longer-term housing while also competing with the general population seeking vacation rentals.
Due to the absence of an actual physical product, the next phase in this plan is to create a Minimum Viable Product that can serve as proof of concept and be brought to investors. The design team's role will be to create a prototype that can serve this function.
The Solution
Our UX team created an Interactive SaaS Prototype that demonstrates key flows, functionality, and interactions for A Traveled Path's future website. Alongside this our team also created a package containing KEY deliverables, including a set of annotated wireframes explaining our design decisions, and a design system for use in future iterations of the website.
Our final documentation also included recommendations for next steps and things to consider as A Traveled Path continues to grow.
My Roles: User Experience Designer, UX Researcher, UX Team Member
Duration: 3 weeks
Tools: Figma, Sketching, Zoom, Google Sheets/Excel, Team-created Design System
Research Processes: Deep Dive Analysis, Stakeholder Interview, User Interviews, Competitive Analysis, Usability Testing, Digital Prototyping, Data-Synthesis, Wireframes (Low, Mid, and High fidelity), Prototype Evaluation, Client Interactions
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The Process
Phase ONE : Research and Discovery
Stakeholder Meeting
To kick off the project, our team began with a lot of questions.
This was one of our biggest obstacles– finding a place to start, so we asked ourselves:
“What already exists in this space and how well does it address the unique needs that traveling professionals have? How can we create something that will address the needs of the primary users?”
To gain a clearer sense of our client’s business goals, we held stakeholder meetings with the founder of A Traveled Path Homes.
Competitive Analysis
To gain insight to the needs of the primary audience that A Traveled Path aims to serve, We investigated their competitors to know what they’re doing well with their booking services, in educating and attracting customers and potential investors.
Interviews with Primary Audience: Traveling Nurses and Teachers
Additionally, we interviewed traveling nurses, teachers, AND property owners who’ve used VRBO and AirBnB. Our intention with this method was to dig deeper into the this booking/lodging business space and identify areas of opportunity and pain points, as well as recommendations and suggestions from the interviewees themselves.
Kano Analysis
Towards the end of this Discovery and Research phase, a Kano Analysis was conducted to reveal what features the users themselves deemed valuable and important within a home-rental platform.
Here were some of our most important findings :
Travel Nurses often have 3-month long contracts far from home, expected to find their own housing– so, they need the option to book longer term stays without competing with short-term renters to avoid having to move around constantly.
Traveling Professionals NEED a way to gauge the relative safety, cleanliness, and reputation of a property, and Landlords, a way to gauge the reputation of the potential tenant.
The listing of basic creature comforts and amenities are sometimes the driving force behind a renter’s decision. For example, two of our users mentioned that,
“It’s important to have basic home comforts– like having fully furnished kitchens, laundry machines, and the allowance of pets make for more comfortable, convenient stays.”
Phase TWO : Visualizing and Prototyping the Journey
User and Task Flows
Turning our focus to visualizing the future functions of the website, our team drew up User and Task Flows to help inform our sketching of low-fidelity wireframes.
Information Architecture
In addition to drawing up User and Task Flows, we created an Information Architecture Diagram to give our team consistency, in grouping functions and screens into different parts of the website. This meant that when we drew up low-fidelity wireframes, we had the same ideas to put XXX screen and functionality within YYY Header Tab, and so on. Creating this Diagram in Figma allowed us to easily discuss, brainstorm, and collaborate.
Wireframes : The Journey from Low to Mid and Mid to High Fidelity
Phase THREE : Evaluation
Usability Testing with Primary Target Audiences
Combining both teams, Design and Research, we conducted Usability Testing with their primary audiences– Travel Nurses and Property Owners, on the use of our high-fidelity prototype. In this phase, we wanted to identify user pain points and further push for clarity and simplification— these findings absolutely came in handy for revising and editing our prototype!
Note from Thomas: “We were fortunate to have tested and interviewed with so many participants, sourced from all of our own networks!”
Our Solution to our Client’s Problem!
With these findings as our fuel, we designed an interactive booking platform specifically catered to their primary users- traveling professionals looking to rent and property owners, with which A Traveled Path can use to aid in securing funding and begin providing their service.
Conclusion
Next Steps
In Terms of Business:
Discuss with A Traveled Path about further business goals, such as pitching to investors and obtaining stakeholder feedback.
A Traveled Path will need to partner with hospitals, school organizations, and landlords as its product and business grow, to offer appropriate accommodations and serve geographic markets.
Verification of the traveling professional through the showing of documents, which will allow for the website to be used solely by traveling professionals.
In Terms of Software/Design:
Coordinate with developers and engineers to scope out the creation of a live platform.
Scope for the design of a mobile platform/app to streamline the use of A Traveled Path Homes’ services.
Develop additional features, such as 3D Property walkthroughs, after the development of the live service.
Key Takeaways
By splitting our team of four into two parts— one for Design and one for Research, we were able to keep the timing of our project within our scope of work
In this project, I learned to work in a different manner: putting trust in our teammates by splitting up to tackle different problem areas.
What I Did
Split the team into two parts— one for Design, one for Research.
Worked closely with a team of designers to achieve a much larger, singular goal
Conduct primary and secondary research in order to understand pain points and opportunity areas
Visually present design recommendations that support key goals