Creating an experience brand and app for experiences

Description:
Experience-based businesses are growing and thriving, like never before. We set out to create a product to help these businesses leverage the Shopify platform so they could easily get up and running and offer their experiences.

Challenge:
I was tasked as the design lead to create and brand a time-based booking product that lived within the Shopify ecosystem. The initial version of Experiences App was designed to stand out and at the same time, be unnoticeable. We wanted it to stand out among ticketing, and booking options by focusing its features on businesses that participate in the experience economy. But, the UX and structure needed to blend into the potentially thousands of different themes that customers used. We also wanted the admin side of it to feel seamless to Shopify store owners.

The Journey:
We chose Shopify as the platform to start on since it’s the largest e-commerce platform in the world, but it doesn’t offer any schedule reservation functionality. We did research and talked with store owners to understand what they need to be successful. We created prototypes and tested them with potential clients. We used the feedback to finalize the design for our MVP. Since we used Shopify, we wanted to make sure the UI and UX felt natural to store owners, so we used the Shopify Polaris design system. The system covers some fundamental interactions, but the majority of UX was unaccounted for since our product is time-based. We designed new components and flows that Polaris didn’t account for and made them feel native to the Polaris system.

The MVP launched and was more successful than hoped. Large and small scale organizations started using the app. Some have used it to supplement the sales of their physical goods, but some have gone on to create entire experience based businesses. Because of the widely varied use cases, we went on to develop new customer UX patterns that would be flexible based on the businesses needs.

Outcome:
The app is still in its infancy, but it has a bright future. In 6 months and without any marketing, the app has over 150 subscribed businesses. Some of the companies include ADT, Shopify, The Candle Bar, and Momofuku Milk Bar.