When & Where

This idea began when we started travelling and discovered that travelling on a packaged holiday or a tour group was expensive. If we wanted to go somewhere on a minimum budget, it would require a lot of research and effort to sync everything together. We used a spreadsheet, an excellent way to bring it all together, but it wasn’t the most user-friendly approach. We thought, “How cool would this be if it was an app we could use?” So here we are.

Brand

When & Where is much more than travelling. It is about the memories that people make when they go somewhere. Whether alone, with a loved one or with a group of friends, that specific time bonds people and leaves very positive memories that shape the rest of our lives.

We looked at the many memories we created while travelling and wanted to apply those happy moments to our brand. Jumping from one place to the next was a wondrous experience. Using those ideas for the logo and the brand was essential to ensuring it reminded users of the fun and whimsical experience that travelling should be.

Language

How you talk to the users is one of the most critical parts of any app. The tone of voice and how that carries across the design system, marketing, and how it makes you feel.

Logo

We wanted to create a whimsical logo that inherits enjoyable aspects of travelling using colour and shape. We thought about the round planet we exist on and all the great things that live on it. The round characteristic became something that worked its way into our visual language.

Colours

We went through a range of different colour schemes. It became clear that we needed a fun and tropical colour representing all the travel's goodness. We noticed that turquoise, evident in many tropical landscapes, always brought out sensations of tranquillity, excitement and adventure. From there, I added base colours (black to white) and secondary colours to help with emphasis or hierarchy.

Typography

I looked at all the visual elements slowly starting to embed themselves in our brand. We looked at how a typeface could help us blend the design language into a cohesive experience. We decided to go with Proxima Nova, a workhorse font with roundedness attributes and a range of many different styles and weights.

UX

We were seasoned travellers – having travelled across six continents in many different forms. We knew our own experiences would bring out the issues across the travel industry and we knew how to resolve them.

Target Audience

Pain points vs Goals

We ran a couple of workshops examining travellers' issues in the current technological and economic markets. We used recent statistics from sites that track global travel information, existing research, and our own experiences to help us understand the problems customers face when trying to book a holiday.

We used Miro to digitalise all our notes and affinity maps against common themes that cause travellers pain points and how we could resolve them through our platform.

IA

I started looking at different parts of our design system. Navigational space helps us define how our users would access other platform parts. This approach allowed us to understand where information would sit, live and grow within the navigational space.

Sitemap

Alongside the navigational space, I looked at the information hierarchy and where specific pages/sections would live within our platform.

Atomic Design

A key design methodology was to use Atomic Design to help us break down all the components during our wireframe/concept process into manageable interactions.

UI

The look and feel are essential parts of designing any digital product. Why? Because I'm deciding how the system unfolds in front of the users, how it reacts and makes the users feel, and how usable it is. When working in lower fidelity, you never properly see the final version. The UI layer of product design lets us peek into a more finished product to see how it'll look for our users. 

After a couple of rounds of concept-testing through different levels of (low to medium) fidelity, I became confident enough to start putting together the next layer of the “design onion” – how it looks and feels.

The main floor of our digital product has a light theme, while the higher floors (first and second) have darker themes. This approach tries to help the user with the orientation and rhythm.

Mobile

Desktop

The Big

Combinator

We applied to Y-combinator to help us with guidance and networking. We both felt those were the two main aspects money couldn’t buy. Learning from intelligent and charismatic people is worth its weight in gold! How to pitch, what to talk about, how to manage millions of dollars, and how to hire good people were some of the things we were hoping to learn from applying to Y-combinator.

During the process of applying, we learned a lot of things and I used my experience from the past 12 years to bring together that all-important pitch deck to help us stand out and bring our idea to life. We also learnt a lot about the travel industry and why our idea should be out there.

Macrocosm and Microcosm

We felt it was important to outline our long-term (Macrocosm) and short-term (Microcosm) plans for our business venture. Not only did this help us figure out what we needed to do, but it also helped us figure out how big our team needed to be, how much money we needed, etc.

Opportunity stats

We researched lots of travel statistics to give us some complex data to prove our idea had numbers that show it is an area of growth and has the potential to be a revenue generator.

Disruption

Other travel companies focus on their missions, such as transport, accommodation and activities, but not the whole picture and where the traveller still needs to tie all of those things together into a manageable itinerary. Taking the stress out of travelling isn’t just about the individual successes of booking flights and hotels. It’s about providing a holistic service that truly understands that each traveller is unique and the whole experience is just as important as each part. We are a disruptive startup that will provide a user experience unknown to the more prominent travel companies.

As a designer going through this process, I learned much about other sides of the product, mainly viability and feasibility. Using my core skills showed me how important design is in providing a business with a better understanding of the user and how to create a digital product.