Hostfully helps vacation rentals provide a professional looking experience to their guests by sharing property information and high quality, authentic recommendations with a beautifully printed or digitized guidebook. During a three week period, my team and I worked to enhance the experience for the small-scale enterprise user. We conducted research and, with our findings, designed a solution which we later tested. After a few iterations, we built an interactive prototype as a final deliverable.

The problem

Hostfully is a high touch start up company and doesn't have the manpower to continue providing dedicated attention to its current or potential customer's sustainability. Their website needs to make customers feel supported and confident in exploring the free trial period and purchase process without having direct contact with Hostfully staff.

Brainstorm & Research

We began by researching the market to understand Hostfully's competitors. We also explored Hostfully’s user experience by creating a free guidebook both as an individual and as a small-scale enterprise user. The team then conducted a heuristic evaluation of their website and analyzed the current state using a journey map to identify pain points. Finally, we interviewed Hostfully's employees, current clients, and potential clients in order to better understand the on-boarding process.

Key Takeaways & Insights

We synthesized our research and developed the following key insights:

• Customers currently feel supported and listened to by Hostfully, so any changes we recommend must ensure customer satisfaction isn't negatively affected.
• During the guidebook creation, customers prefer an alternative to organizing and creating their cards.
• Terminology on the site makes the guidebook creation more cumbersome.

Design & Prototype

User Flow

Our first step was to deep dive into the navigation of the free trial experience. After a few white-boarding sessions, we decided to have the free trial form as a pop-up instead of it's own page. 

Wireframes

Hi-Fidelity Mocks

We aligned our proposed design solutions with the existing design of Hostfully by creating hi-fidelity mocks. Here are the mocks for the free trial sign up form.

Next Steps

Given Hostfully’s fantastic customer service support and our pivot mid design sprint, we provided the following recommendations:

• Evaluate compatibility with current state development.
• Create a future state journey map to identify and solve for potential pain points created by a new flow.
• Validate the user experience with further testing of prototype. Iterate designs as needed.
• Identify nuances of larger enterprise user flow (20+ listings) to ensure holistic solution.
• Strategize methods to ensure continued customer loyalty and support during the evolution of Hostfully’s service model.