the dyrt
camping trip planner.
business goal.
Prove to investors that our new premium subscription offering is scalable by earning 1 million in top line revenue during first year of launch.
insights.
Camping vehicle sales are growing rapidly in the US and buyers continue to diversify in age and camping experience. We are also getting user feedback and feature requests from RV campers.
process.
Competitor Analysis -> Customer Interviews -> Form Hypothesis -> Prototype, Test, iterate, repeat.
hypothesis
A lightweight, easy-to-use planning tool rooted in our trusted community data will: 1. stand apart from bloated or non-specialized travel tools in the market, 2. attract new RV users to our platform, and 3. appeal to our existing user base looking to camp along a route
one of my favorite moments in the design process is a cross-functional team passing around a dry-erase marker.
We explored a horizontal workspace but quickly abandoned it to optimize for our responsive grid.
I believe the ideal function of a product designer is to facilitate ideation from teammates with different expertise and then transform the group’s idea through a refinement process into polished specs.
To make our trip planner as simple and straightforward as possible, we start users off in a trip setup wizard. They answer some simple questions about their travel needs and then are rewarded with the big reveal of their custom trip, ta-dah!
learning from users.
As soon as our hypothesis took the shape of feasible wireframes, I built a clickable prototype and we started validating with users in moderated usability sessions.
We repeated this process through three iterations — defining features and adding refinement until we felt confident enough to start development.
Once we had our design built in our staging environment, we were able to refine our data integration with more user testing.
We launched with confidence in our MVP as well a well defined backlog of features to add in future iterations.
results.
Reached 1M revenue in September, surpassing sales goals for the year by 40%
Caught the eye of new partners and investors.
21K Trips Planned in first month of launch. Engagement on Trip Planner is second only to Search, our core offering.
Leadership invested in growing the design team.