VRBO
vacation rental booking
Reducing time to booking by improving search and property evaluation
ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES
Visual Design, Usability testing,
Heuristic Evaluation,
High fidelity prototyping
STACK
Figma, Zoom,
Google Sheets
TEAM
Nicholas Yuan
Pranav Meda
Poorva Jain
TIMELINE
Sep 2023 - Dec 2023
Context
How I turned Curiosity into Clarity
VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner) is a travel booking platform that connects travellers with vacation rentals listed directly by property owners. While it operates in the same category as Airbnb, VRBO has a significantly smaller user base, with approximately 48 million users compared to Airbnb’s 150 million.
As part of a Human-Computer Interaction course at San José State University, I worked on an evidence-based redesign of the VRBO mobile app. The goal of this project was not to redesign the entire product, but to study how users interact with the existing experience and identify opportunities to improve engagement and decision-making.
Problem
PropGPT’s power was hidden behind confusing flows and cluttered screens.
One Flow Tried to Do Two Jobs
Evaluating a bet is about clarity and decision-making. Building a parlay is about exploration and risk-taking. Mixing them together caused overload. Users weren’t sure if they were finishing one bet or stacking multiple.
No Discovery, Users Went to Discord
Without quick, trustworthy discovery, users saw PropGPT as extra work instead of a daily habit. The app couldn’t compete with the fast, social discovery experience on Discord.
Every Bet Was Auto-Saved to Parlays
Users didn’t need every bet they searched to be saved. Even worse, on the homepage. There was no separation between individual bets and parlays which frustrated users.
Some of the comments users made in testing
Solution
Bringing Clarity in every flow
Evaluate Bet user flow
Evaluate Bet user flow
Evaluate Bet user flow