Ohania is the name of a startup I was working on together with Ana Baos and Pedro Robles, incubated by Demium Startups in Madrid.
Ana and I came up with the idea of Ohania after finding out Journy, a quite successful startup in the USA, focused on wealthy millennials and foodies who wanted to travel around the world in a very customized way.
At the same time, we detected a big pain in the Spanish market, probably also present internationally: families with kids find many handicaps while travelling. So, we decided to fight that pain, adapting the Journy model to our new target.
Firstly, we defined the customer persona for this ideal target. This was finally Claudia, a 38-year-old woman, mother of a 6-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter. She is married to David, 2 years older than her and both of them are working, have good salaries, and love to spend their holidays travelling around the world in a family.
The second step was to interview 50 people based on our customer persona (both male and female, 30-50 years old, with at least one child, medium-high economic status) to understand well how to build our product and our brand.
Basically, we tested Journy’s business model, comparing it with the traditional travel agencies’ one; we learnt how travel decisions (destination, budget, activities, etc.) were taken; and we noted which problems were more common while travelling with kids.
To summarize all this and to understand our user better, we worked on our customer persona’s journey.
Considering our target and our business, we wanted to communicate the following values: proximity, transparency, warmth, family and adventure.
For the naming, we came up with Ohania, combining the term ‘Ohana’ (in the Hawaiian language it has a wide meaning of family and being together and it is well known from the Disney movie ‘Lilo & Stitch’) and the Latin suffix ‘-ia’, which refers to land. Also, it worked well in several languages and it has a soft sound which was well considered in some quick tests we did.
Regarding the visual identity, we designed a custom script rounded logo, just containing the name of the product, to make it straight and clear. Also we created a custom iconography to complement the contents when needed. We decided to use a warm light green as primary color, to communicate those values we already noted. Nevertheless, this would be complemented by white and dark grey to get the contrast depending on the context.
About the photographic style, we chose dynamic, human and warm pictures, also to reflect the brand’s main values.
Once the brand was defined, we started working on the product.
Since we had the reference of Journy, the first step was to test this finished product (even better than a prototype) with 10 people who we considered a representation of our target. Half of them tested the desktop version and the other half used the mobile one. This simple research already brought some big conclusions:
With this first feedback, we worked on the digital platform, choosing all the possible modules we would like to have. Then we classified by card sorting and finally worked on the information architecture to build the site map.
At this point, we had information enough to start sketching how will be our screens, at least the first version of them. We have 4 main interfaces:
1. the home screen where we include all the information about our services and the CTAs to get the user to try them.
2. the ‘questionnaire’ screens are all of them quite similar, but with some variations, we need to take into consideration.
3. the ‘user page’ screen, where the user can find a special admin screen where he or she can check the past, ongoing and oncoming trips, configure settings, plan new trips, etc.
4. the last interface is the blog, keeping the visual coherence with the rest of the site.
After sketching, we set up the wireframes for each of them, basing the whole designs on an adaptative grid valid for all devices. These wireframes were tested in a high fidelity prototype presented to 10 people who were interviewed to detect possible issues while navigating our interface and, especially, trying to pay for the final product. This was hugely important to validate the business.
