Have you ever wanted to spend the night in a haunted place? Scarebnb is a new, chilling rental app where you can browse the worlds spookiest bed and breakfasts, apartment rentals, homes and more. It is also completely fictional, produced through a fun workshop I held with my team while working at Neovation. The goal was to spend a short amount of time creating something new and different to refresh our creative minds.
We had a very short amount of time to work out a concept from ideation to hi-fidelity mockup. I researched other rental apps; airbnb, apartment rentals, house rentals, etc. Given that the app was niche territory that would allow for a lot of play in the design, I wanted the functionality to be familiar to set a solid base for the concept to build upon.
Once that was in place, we began to play with the design. I looked for places we could break the mold, play with design standards without confusing or alienating our users. Could we use playful icons without diminishing their definition? Could we play with shapes in our buttons, add iconography to our backgrounds and containers. All of this was to cater to our audience; people looking for a different kind of vacation experience, and alternative crowd with a love for paranormal, halloween, and scares. Making them feel seen by the service they are seeking out.
Scarebnb is a homestay app with a lot of personality. Allowing space for playing with design rules, even potentially breaking them, allowed for a much more creative process and a result with pizzazz. The elements are grounded by the familiar functionality while still having the user feel represented by the service in its design, encouraging them to use it. Having a solid base allowed us to design rapidly and gave us the time to focus on the more unique elements; design the pumpkin buttons, icon designs, and functionality such as what to filter by, catchy descriptions, etc.
Not only did we have such a fun time designing Scarebnb but it was also revitalizing. It was completely different than what we were designing for Neovation, and yet the lessons learned impacted Neovations Apps.