Hipcamp is a two-sided marketplace for camping on private land. Think: Airbnb for camping!

The Project

Campers’ struggle to understand and select the ideal campsite on a property best for them led to negative reviews from mismatched expectations. To address this consumer problem, the Host team had to overhaul how Hosts configured their campsites upstream.

My Role

As Design and Research Lead, I facilitated a complete redesign of the Host property management experience. Leading six rounds of user interviews, I iterated countless times across six key mobile + desktop flows. As a ground-up build, I established new patterns and components for our new design system.

The Outcome

The MVP has made a meaningful impact thus far, as the full experience is currently being built. Hosts have seen a 21% bump in booking conversion and Camper retention has increased 30% as the search experience improved across 175K impacted campsites. Hosts have praised the new design during user testing and are eager to use it.

Highlights & Key Flows

Property tab

Goal

Enable Hosts to easily navigate between the details of their property, sites, extras, and map

Reinforce how listings are presented to campers

Outcome

Over 175K sites were updated, resulting in a 30% increase in Camper retention

Successfully created and integrated new design system components (header, tabs, buttons, carousel)

“Honestly, as good as Airbnb’s editor is, I think this is even better!” - Josh, Hipcamp Host in California

“I love that I can see all my sites in one place. The thumbnails help me see what campers see.” - John, Host in WA

Site Editor

Goal

Allow Hosts to easily edit their sites (for the first time ever in-app!)

Motivate hosts to improve their online listings to increase camper engagement

Outcome

After MVP launch, 68% of Hosts made updates where missing information was indicated

Hosts that added site-specific information saw a 21% bump in booking conversion

“I’m constantly making changes. This makes it a lot easier for me to find what I’m looking for” - Elizabeth, Hipcamp Host in Milwaukee

The Process Explained

The Problem

Not all sites on a campground are created equal. For example, let’s imagine a beautiful campground in Big Sur, California. One site might have a view of the ocean with a picnic table, and another might be in the woods, closer to a bathroom. These details matter to campers, but Hipcamp’s product experience wasn’t optimized for distinguishing between these features. This made it difficult for campers to choose the right site for them on a Host’s property.

How do we solve this?

After diving in deeper, it became clear that this was ultimately a data problem. Campers desired specific details about sites, but Hipcamp didn’t allow Hosts to provide those details. So, the solution was clear: we needed to update the Host platform UX to collect and present the site-specific information that campers expected to see. The hypothesis was that this improved experience for Hosts and Campers alike would impact our product goals of increasing camper retention and booking conversion.

The Process

In order to begin to address this problem, I split out the process into 5 testing phases:

Validation Phase

Overhauling the entire Host and Camper product experiences was going to be a major initiative, so it was important to understand if it would be worth the effort before diving in. We measured this by showing a wireframe-based prototype to a group of Hosts and Campers in order to validate our hypothesis and ensure the idea had legs. We asked participants to compare the older property-centric layout against a new site-centric approach and asked which one they preferred.

Overwhelmingly, Hosts and Campers preferred the new site-centric version. Campers liked that they could view details about each site alongside a map to help get a lay of the land, while Hosts liked that they’d be able to offer specific details about each of their sites. This gave us the go-ahead to explore further.

Navigating the Experience

In order to understand how Hosts would best navigate this new experience, it was important to dig into how they understood their land. I approached this with a card-sorting exercise to better understand how Hosts thought about property-level information versus site-level information. These findings impacted the overall information architecture of the experience.

The next step was to test this with a lo-fi prototype to understand how to best visually distinguish between property and sites. We tested two layouts:

• Version A: Keep the content on a single page, with a summary of property details at the top, and a list of sites below.

• Version B: Utilize tabs to separate between property, sites, and other categories like extras and maps.

The flow below showcases how a Host might edit site-level information like pricing between the two versions:

It turned out that both of these formats tested well with Hosts. However, because the tab format was preferred by Hosts with a lot of sites and generally scaled better for future optimizations, we opted for Version B.

High-Fidelity Prototype

At this stage, it was time to build out the prototype further to address edge cases and ensure that Hosts could easily navigate their wide breadth of data. After all, we were working with over 200 flows! At this stage, I asked Hosts a series of questions/tasks and watched as they navigated each layer of the prototype. We also tested discoverability of missing information. Below is an example of an in-depth flow, adding a missing description and updating the site’s capacity:

The hi-fi prototype testing very well with Hosts, who raved about the new experience and were excited to use it themselves! They were easily able to distinguish between property vs. site information, and navigated the experience seamlessly (aside for some minor UI issues). After addressing those fixes and building out each flow diligently, it was time to release the final designs. You can view some of the highlights at the top of the page.

Impact to Date

While the full experience is set to launch later this year, the MVP has already made an impressive impact on the business thus far:

• 68% of Hosts fixed missing information within 30 days

• Those Hosts have seen a 21% increase in booking conversion

• Over 700K photos have been uploaded since the MVP launch

• We’ve seen a 30% YoY increase in camper retention thus far

With such significant impact from a scrappy MVP launch, the sky is the limit for how successful the full experience will be. I’m looking forward to sharing the full results here once we receive data!

Conclusion & Learnings

This was a massive all-hands-on-deck project, involving nearly every team at the company. I’m proud of the work we accomplished in such a short time, promoting user needs and business goals alike. Being my first time working on a two-sided marketplace, I learned quickly that constant communication was imperative; everything that changed on the Host side would be directly reflected on the Camper side. Additionally, because we were building out a design system simultaneously, I learned first-hand how important it was to have a structured system for design QA - dedicating champions to each component and project it would touch from the very start. Thank you for reading!