What I owned
Designed both sides from scratch, a traveler app and an agency admin portal, grounded in research before a single wireframe.
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Wandr · 20230→1 · Marketplace · Travel · 2023
Two sides, zero users. A travel marketplace from nothing.
Built a two-sided travel marketplace from scratch, convincing offline agencies to go digital and travelers to leave Booking.com. No users on either side. Pure 0→1.
Travelers won't come without agencies. Agencies won't list without travelers. Two sides, zero users, and me talking to 200+ of them before I let myself draw a single screen.
+200+
survey respondents before a single wireframe
- Role
- Product Designer · 0→1
- Duration
- 2023
- Platforms
- Mobile app + Agency admin portal
- Industry
- Travel · Marketplaces
The setup
Travel marketplaces need agency supply and traveler demand to reinforce each other. Wandr was designed to make progress on both sides from zero, in a market shaped by global OTAs with decade-long head starts.
Role & constraint
The constraint
A market owned by Booking.com and global OTAs with a decade head start, and offline agencies still running on WhatsApp and phone calls.
The problems
What was actually broken.
Problem 01
How do you get travelers to leave Booking.com?
Booking.com has trust, inventory, and a decade of UX refinement. Wandr needed agency-curated trips that felt different from commodity booking in the first 30 seconds.
Problem 02
How do you convince offline agencies to go digital?
Most agencies ran on WhatsApp and phone calls. Listing on Wandr had to be easier than posting on Instagram, or they wouldn't bother.
Problem 03
Group booking was broken everywhere
200+ respondents flagged it as the #1 friction point. Booking for multiple people, each with different info and documents, was a nightmare on every competing platform.
Problem 04
The dev team needed speed, not complexity
Early-stage startup, frequent pivots. The design system had to be lightweight enough to adapt, not a liability.
The decisions
From evidence to a design decision.
Research first
Competitor analysis, agency workflow interviews, 200+ traveler surveys, and 6 personas, all before pixels.
Test the group flow
Tested a shared booking flow where each traveler enters their own details.
Lower the barrier
Designed trip creation as a lighter starting point for agencies moving from WhatsApp and phone calls.
The solutions
What I actually did about it.
01Solution 01 / 03
Research before pixels
Competitor analysis (Booking.com, Travco, Stamps, Gazef), agency workflow interviews, 200+ traveler survey, 6 personas across 3 segments, journey maps, all before a single wireframe.
Strategy grounded in real behavior
preview soon
02Solution 02 / 03
Multi-person booking flow
Each traveler enters their own data independently inside one shared booking flow.
Designed and tested the flow with users so group documents and preferences could stay separate.
User-tested group-booking flow
preview soon
03Solution 03 / 03
A lightweight agency wizard
Trip-creation wizard with drag-and-drop media upload and an analytics dashboard, designed to lower setup effort for agencies.
A simpler starting point for agencies going digital
preview soon
By the numbers
+200+
survey respondents
6
personas across 3 segments
2
sides built from zero
4
competitors analyzed
Project period: 2023
Built on what people actually do. Not what we hoped they'd do.
Gallery
A closer look.
Key visuals from the project, then the individual decision screens. Full-fidelity shots of those are coming soon.
Reflection
What I'd carry forward
I over-invested in research so I'd never have to redraw the product. By the time I wireframed, the hard calls were already made. In 0→1, the cheapest pixel is the one you never draw twice.
Related work
More evidence across connected product problems.
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