Alex Cox

Our Expedia stakeholders tasked my team and me with creating a travel package booking app for college students.

We set about interviewing college students to determine their most significant pain points and frustrations when booking travel.

After conducting 30 interviews, we created and sent out a survey. We received over 500 responses and assigned quantitative values to the number of people who faced similar problems in travel.

Using this data, I conducted a competitive analysis of over 50 travel apps to determine what gaps existed in the mobile travel market.

Finding the most significant pain points and gaps in the travel market enabled us to propose a few solutions for our Expedia stakeholders.

We suggested focussing on personalizing the travel experience and recommending packages customers were likely interested in.

We got approval and began testing UI designs for this solution. By May 2016, we were able to lock down the plans and start development with user testing conducted every two weeks.

By August, we finished our MVP and began the process of launching internally. Then, we launched in October 2016 and iterated on the product based on feedback through 2017.

Our goal was to target the often neglected user group of seniors who were 75+ years old.

Technology and user interface design are moving quickly and dropping many helpful hints new users used to rely on. We wanted to start from scratch with a UI design specifically designed for and with older adults.

To begin the process, we surveyed ten people to see how they communicate with their older loved ones.

We found that most of the adults we interviewed do not talk to their grandparents or parents as much as they’d like.

We then crafted a survey that we sent out to 100 users to assign more quantitative values to the problem areas we were noticing.

Once we received the survey, we saw that communication with older adults was the biggest pain point, so we started designing user interfaces for them.

Once we had a few different designs ready, we partnered with a local assisted living home and tested the designs with older adults there. Initially, we were not doing so well, but over the weeks, as we honed the design, we were able to craft a design that 90% of users could learn to use within five minutes.

We began development in April 2017 and launched on the app store in August 2017.

Wynd Halo has ten sensors to monitor allergens, smoke, germs, pollution, and more. It features an innovation called Air ID, which classifies the actual pollutants in the air so that you can take the right course of action. Wynd Halo pairs seamlessly with the Wynd Home Purifier to remove any contaminants from your environment quickly and automatically.

I surveyed our existing users to understand what about their air they were most interested in. I then presented the research and suggestions to our hardware and software teams. We then defined the possible specifications for what would become the Wynd Halo could do for our users.

From there, I worked with our users to pound out the specific features they were interested in for the device.

This device’s key selling point became its ability to control other devices and use its ten sensors to understand your environment and automatically tweak it for you. That means lights on when you come into a room and sleep suggestions based on how bright or loud your room is.

I then led our design and software teams to create the Halo’s interface and iOS/Android apps—ultimately resulting in the launch of the device in October 2019 to over 3,000 of our Kickstarter backers.