Experience Design at Evolve VR

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

My most recent responsibility at Evolve has been the design, testing, and implementation of a new 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 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, called Basecamp, has already saved hundreds of work-hours in its short 2 month release window, as well as enabled bulk-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 for future dates.

Guest-Facing Work

My responsibilities on the Guest-facing side of the business include analyzing survey data and conducting interviews to help determine design priorities. From here, I sketch and wireframe new designs, share prototypes, and work with the development team to build new features and create optimizations to improve conversion. During my time at Evolve I have designed a more intuitive booking calendar, similar property highlights, and payment enhancements including Apple Pay and Affirm. These projects helped fuel guest conversion, as well as improved site accessibility.

Booking Calendar Enhancements

The Evolve booking calendar is one of the most important components in the guest-facing portion of the site. It enables users to explore which dates are available, which are blocked by owners, and what stipulations must be met for a successful date selection.

Previous versions of the calendar did not meet accessibility standards, and the user could encounter up to six separate, 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.

Based on my research, I identified several essential features that would accompany a redesign of the calendar and its architecture. These included start and end indicators for blocked days, which would make afternoon check-ins clearer to guests, dynamic bolding of dates to communicate minimum stay requirements, and tooltips to handle errors well before submission of a date set.

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.

Payment Elements

Another major milestone I lead at Evolve was the integration and design of third party payment elements, as well as the re-platforming of the payment handler as Evolve became the Merchant of Record for bookings.

I worked with developers and designers to implement Stripe as Evolve’s payment handler, as well as Apple Pay and Affirm as alternate payment methods. This included top of funnel calls to action, payment estimation, Affirm integrations on listings, checkout flows, and support pages, as well as error flows and edge case handling.

It was important to work closely with the Affirm and Stripe teams to ensure that branding elements were preserved, as well as to create seamless designs for a new component on the Evolve page. These integrations are also extremely important as they make vacation rentals more accessible to guests, by breaking up the payments into more manageable pieces.