Yonder
Yonder believes that nature brings out the best in all of us.
As their creative and technology partner, we helped shape their brand for its very first introduction to the public: a beautifully functional mammoth of digital product design.
Along with romancing travelers and intriguing potential hosts, the Yonder website had to solve for all of the challenges of a traditional booking website, and then some.
This wasn’t just about a beautiful place to stay, it was about everything you can do while you’re there. Finding the right way to include “experiences” into the flow took lots of UX/UI consideration and kicked development into a new gear.
The travel industry is all about wide, sweeping photography. It’s immersive and gorgeous, but it’s also table stakes.
We let Yonder’s nature-driven mission inspire our art direction to give their promise and personality a look all its own. These hand-drawn illustrations brought an organic element to a digital platform.
As its first outward-facing communication, the website was solving for brand story, voice, tone, and functional messaging all at once.
Developing this website was more than nailing search functionality and perfecting the booking logistics. It was about working closely with Yonder’s in-house technical engineers as a unified team.
This complex platform needed back-end features that would support our front-end build, which can be quite a tangle. Success, as usual, was the result of frequent, friendly collaboration.
When you think about it, short-term rental booking sites are largely reliant on user generated content. To give property owners their best shot at getting booked, and build in some quality control measures to the site’s aesthetic, creating user-friendly photography guidelines was a win for everyone involved.
Yonder trusted us to come alongside their founding team to build a vision for the brand experience and digital booking platform that would launch them into the world. This work was as meaningful and rewarding as it was challenging. From strategy and story to design, content, and technology, we flexed the full talent stack of our studio to help make a connection that happens decidedly outside of digital, a connection to nature.
Strategy Lead
Yonder is the newcomer in a relatively mature industry, defined by a familiarity that both the user and the host have with existing online booking tools. The challenge was to build a platform that felt second-nature for the user, yet also avoided the pitfalls of the Yellow Pages-style offering from competitors that dissatisfied users and hosts alike.
Creative Lead
Yonder challenged us with the idea of creating a unique one-of-a-kind booking site that could bridge the gap between what is to be an emotionally driven brand experience and a rock solid usable product. The goal was to find a perfect harmony between the two. Some of my favorite Yonder features are the “storybooks”, which allow for prideful hosts to tell their authentic audio and visual stories, as well the hand drawn illustrations we handled in house. When you pair features such as these with a plethora of hard working booking tools, you’ll find yourself booked and out the door.
Technical Lead
Our team worked closely with Yonder's CTO to inform and execute against feature sets that would help position Yonder as an equal but different player in the arena of peer-to-peer property rentals and experiences. Working alongside our adjacent team at Yonder, Bukwild iterated and delivered quickly in order to bring to market a product that we (Bukwild) deemed necessary for the world to experience.