A Collaboration & User Perspective
The Good Land Beyond X Thatch
Overview
My Role
This case study is different from my other ones as it is a mix of a project that I designed and a product that I am a user of, allowing me to dive into the user perspective, and collaborate with the dev team to make the product better.
Team
The Good Land Beyond, a photography and travel blog, is a solo project that has turned into a collaboration with Thatch.co, a travel tech start-up from San Francisco.
Timeline
I have been working on The Good Land Beyond since 2017 and collaborating with Thatch since June 2023.
Background The Good Land Beyond
Blog TGLB since April 2017
Collab with Thatch since June 2023It was always meant to be simply a creative outlet but as life got busy, we decided that I would continue the project as a solo project, publishing some of my photography and sharing about some of my favorite destinations around the world.
Problem
Travel blogs are everywhere and advertising a blog on social media and investing in better SEO is time-consuming and tedious. That's why for years, the blog was something I turned to once in a while to be creative but the thought of few people finding and consuming what I was creating was not giving me lots of motivation.
Solution
Enter: Thatch.co . The travel tech start-up from San Francisco was founded by West Askew and Abby West to make unique travel experiences more accessible for everyone. At its core, Thatch is a platform filled with curated interactive travel guides and maps to help you plan and research your next trip. Once I found it, it took me five minutes to realize what a gem this app is, and what stood out to me from a Product Design perspective is how beautifully designed and engineered the app and website are.
So I started my own little travel shop on Thatch, combining my existing blog with the platform and started creating guides that others can find more easily and enjoy.
How does this relate to Product Design?
Compared to the other case studies, I cannot claim the UX/UI design of Thatch as my own, but it has been interesting to catch me analyzing the design from a user perspective as well as a junior designer perspective. As Thatch is still in its baby shoes, Abby, West, and their team have built a small community of users like me they are constantly asking for feedback, profiting from free user testing from people who care about the product and its future success.
Whenever I find a bug, have an idea for how a feature could be improved, or even propose a feature that does not exist yet, I can get in touch with them about potential implementation. It's been valuable because while I am first and foremost a user, I've been learning a lot about the design process and how important user interviews, A/B testing and research are for a successful digital product.
It has taught me the importance of finding a group of people who care about the product I'm building and are willing to give honest feedback outside of my own perspectives and opinions on a product.