Product Designer - Experience Design Team

Evolve Vacation Rental Management is a company that serves Vacation Rental Guests, Owners, and Partners in order to create a seamless vacation rental experience.

As a Product Designer on the Experience Design team of Evolve’s digital platform, I work on the Guest, Owner, and internal tooling sites and systems. My responsibilities are focused on learning about guests, owners, and internal users through surveys, interviews, and session recordings. Using these findings, I work with senior leadership, the project management team, and my fellow designers to prioritize and build positive user experiences, optimized purchase flows, and create new features.

Internal Tooling Work

My most recent responsibility at Evolve has been the as lead designer for Basecamp; a net-new tool for Revenue Managers. I lead design, testing, and implementation this internal tool for Evolve’s Revenue Organization to improve the control our team has on property pricing. Our system uses an algorithm called SmartRates to build 370+ days of nightly pricing for our 30,000 properties - but those prices sometimes need adjustment by Revenue Managers. When an event is announced, or a region is booking quickly, these RMs can apply Final Price Modifiers, Price Overrides, Custom Minimum Rates, and more to maximize an Owner’s earnings night by night. Formerly, this tool was powered by SalesForce, with very limited customization for our usage. The new tool has already saved hundreds of work-hours since its release. In addition to replacing SalesForce based tooling, we have launched bulk rule-setting functionality, the ability to apply modifiers to newly created segments like “ski-in/ski-out” properties, and enabled system logging of these changes to improve the SmartRates algorithm.

Owner-facing work

Another area of focus for me is the owner facing website and iOS/Android app. I lead the payment, finance, and tax-reporting sections of the owner facing account systems, and work to increase clarity and accuracy in our reporting of owner earnings, tax remittance, and transactions. More recently, I led a project that revamped the way Evolve handles owner-initiated guest cancellations, and resulted in a redesign of the Reports section of the site - within 3 weeks from inception to launch. As a result of researching, designing, and building a new Adjustments tab, I was able to help the company reclaim $980k in outstanding owner debits within 4 months of our product launch, with very limited negative feedback.

Guest-Facing Work

Another area of work at Evolve is on the guest-facing, direct booking side of the business. The Evolve booking calendar is one of the most important components in the guest-facing portion of the site. Previous versions of the calendar did not meet accessibility standards, and the user could encounter up to six distinct error messages after submitting a date selection request. I conducted both moderated and unmoderated tests that compared Evolve’s calendar system to those in use at Google, AirBnb, and Vrbo to understand which calendar features were most important to guests as they progressed from trip planning to trip booking. I identified several essential features that would accompany a redesign of the calendar and its architecture. As a result of these changes, errors in calendar input was reduced by 38%, and trended downward as tooltips taught users how to avoid selecting unavailable dates.