I joined Vast as the second designer in 2009. I responsible for product, UX and visual design in Autos and Travel verticals.
Vast is a vertical search engine company with brilliant data science behind. Not just simply presenting data; Vast connects buyers, sellers & publisher. Backed by ventures like Clearstone Venture Partners and Leapfrog Ventures; Vast provides solutions on autos, real estate and travel verticals.
I joined Vast as the second designer in 2009. I responsible for product, UX and visual design in Autos and Travel verticals.
Vast works with many publishers; portals, newspapers, etc. Every one of them has a different page width, different style, different everything. I analyzed our partners and created standards for Vast Autos Platform.
Creating simple and yet flexible interfaces allowed us move fast as a team. Tons of design ideas and prototypes shaped Vast's current platform that powers hundreds of different websites today used by millions of customers.
I strongly believe that there is no one way to happiness. A designer should be finding different solutions to a problems. One of the things I loved about working at Vast was that we were able to test any idea we had to improve Vast Autos Platform. We often A/B tested our ideas to see if they are really working in real world.
Knowing if something is working or not is easy. But most of the time you don't find an answer to the why question with A/B testing. By organizing user testing sessions, we could see how our customers use our product and how they react. Watching result videos is fun, but going deep with your results and actually understanding them is priceless.
For a sale cycle to start, customers have to to fill out a form on one of our publisher sites. This form is the most important thing in the whole universe. Ok, maybe not. But for a customer to do so, they have to trust us, website and sellers.
In the past this form used to look like a generic contact form. Just labels, inputs and a submit. It was simple; and it did its job. But it wasn't enough for us. We knew we could do better. So we sat down, started drawing ideas on paper. Ideas turned into wireframes, wireframes into prototypes. And then we had it. We turned this simple form into a letter that you fill out only needed a few spaces and when you read it; it sounds like a letter written to the seller.
Mad-Libs killed it. It increased conversion rates by 25-40%.
An online car buying experience starts with you entering what you are looking for. After that, you end up on a search results page, then detail pages where you contact sellers. This works for the most car buyers. And most car buyers contact [redacted] number of sellers on one search session.
“Details page can't be the only way to contact!” began with this, we started to look for other ways to make it easy to contact sellers.
Short after, we found a way to contact not one, but multiple dealers on a search results page. With Multi-Leads feature, customers could easily select multiple listings and contact them all at once.
[redacted] became [redacted] plus 2-4.
Working closely with them, we shipped two products for Southwest Airlines.
We created a way to find travel options for those who has no idea where to go. GetAway Finder doesn't require a destination filter to find getaways. Simply type in your dates, and select a theme if you want, and you ready to browse all Southwest destinations on a nice map.
I worked closely with my team members and Southwest and created mockups, wireframes, prototypes and actual designs. GetAway Finder is still in beta and under development.
Flight Finder is the fastest way to browse Southwest destinations. Previously Southwest Airlines had a similar tool, but it was made with Flash; it felt old and not very easy to use. Inspired by GetAway Finder, we designed this little, speedy tool.
We aimed for speed with Flight Finder. It had to be lightning-fast and easy to use at the same time.
Just like GetAway Finder, I worked on every phase of Flight Finder from idea to final designs.