Sonder app — Designing, launching, and evolving Sonder’s first app for guests

When I first joined Sonder— a startup (at the time) looking to disrupt the hospitality industry with technology— I was surprised to find very little tech in the guest experience. The vision of the founders was, “the lobby in your phone,” but at the time, Sonder had no app, let alone mobile-friendly website to live up to that promise.

As the first UX designer at the company, I set the vision for what would become Sonder’s first app for guests, and helped put together a team to bring this vision to life. To get started, I spent my first few weeks at the company investigating the opportunity space and laying the foundation for future design initiatives :

IMMERSION

Booked and stayed in Sonders for 2 weeks across 3 cities to build my understanding of our guest experience, product and operations.

FOUNDATIONAL USER RESEARCH

Interviewed over 70 guests in-person during their stays to learn more about them, why they chose Sonder, and their experience.

PERSONAS

Created early personas based on themes & insights from the research to help bring awareness to the variety of use cases and guide design at Sonder.

JOURNEY MAPPING

Outlined the guest journey and identified jobs to be done, needs, goals and challenges for each part of the experience. Reframed challenges into experience opportunities for us to consider across the org.

PITCHING THE VISION

Leveraging the research, I put together a vision for what a guest-facing app could look like in the future to sell to leadership and drive funding for the initiative.

LAUNCHING AN MVP

After successfully getting buy-in, I helped lead the team to launch an MVP version of the Sonder app.

BUILDING TO LEARN

Created a design system and architecture that allowed us to quickly test concepts before investing in fully built out features.

USER TESTING

Led quarterly research trips for the team to go out and speak to guests who were using the app during their stay to learn what features they found most valuable and test early concepts.

EVOLVING THE PRODUCT

After a year of continued experimentation, testing and iteration, we had a feature set that was starting to outgrow our MVP design system. Our core product offering was also starting to pivot and with a brand edit underway, it seemed like a good time to restructure parts of the app to make sure we had a strong foundation for all the features we’d want to deliver the following year.