Stay was a travel service for city travel, focusing on high-quality local spots, rather than famous landmarks and global chains. By teaming up with local chefs, baristas, bartenders and artists, Stay was able to build a collection of 30,000 hand-picked venues across 150 cities.
Collaborating with local insiders, Stay features curated quality venues – places you would not easily find on your own.
More than 2500 local baristas, bartenders, chefs, DJs and other experts have revealed their city's best gems.
An in-house editorial team, combined with a global network of freelance writers, made it possible for us to create the most highly refined destination content on the market.
The 30,000 hand-picked hotspots follow the same uniform format, and they were all authored in the same tone of voice.
All content is neatly tagged and categorised, making it easy and familiar for travelers to find places to visit – and easy for developers and designers to build a good product.
The contours of Stay.com's content strategy appeared already in 2011, when we saw that crowd-sourced travel content was headed in the wrong direction. Top travel sites were surfacing marketing-savvy tourist spots, rather than genuinely interesting places.
Involving local experts is an obvious solution to this challenge. There is no better authority on a city's restaurant scene, than an experienced chef living and working in the city.
Stay.com has worked with more than 2500 local bartenders, baristas, chefs, musicians, stylists, designers, architects, historians – people with a special perspective on their home city. Each of them is curating their own list of top-notch venues, the same places that they themselves frequent.
Stay allowed travelers to download the entire city for offline use. This was not limited to the map – the offline bundle would include all the curated city guides, with images, editorial descriptions, and contact details.
We offered the most sophisticated offline support in the travel space for several years. Changes made to a collaborative city guide while offline, would seamlessly be synced with other travelers when you go back online, including conflict resolution.
In ~2015, this was a big deal, due to wildly high data costs abroad, and fewer public WiFi networks than what we are used to today.
Put simply, a Stay city guide is a collection of places, curated by a local with expertise in some area. The guide card represents a guide consistently across all channels and platforms.
A lot of effort and iterations went into these cards, prioritising content, finding a visual balance, and defining rules for how cards adapt to different environments.
The card shape derives its color from the dominant color in the photo, and labels within the card are also variations of colors derived from the photo.
The logotype and app icon was designed by Lars Arve Bratteberg / Minus Minus. From his work I designed a concise 15-page identity manual, covering logo use, typography and colors, as well as photography, language and key visual elements from the UI.
An important part of my role at Stay was to work towards strengthening our five core conversion points: app installs, city downloads, guide creation, invites to collaborate, and day 7 retention. Usability testing, UI behavior tracking, and rapid prototyping were key components in this work.
The Stay UI was routinely tested, both pre-release and in production, in-house and remote, with real users and with people unfamiliar with the service.
I planned and executed most of the usability testing sessions, for both the web and the mobile clients.
I worked closely with the CTO and the developers to design and maintain the application architecture.
Based on user insight, we made a number of deep changes to the core structure of the app.
I had the pleasure of working with a highly skilled and dedicated team.
Wei Zhuo, Leah Plotz, Ariana Hendrix, Andrew Gubanov, Lars Bæk, Gurudutt Verma, Claudia Menger, Alex Makarov, and myself. Joachim Paasche was not there for the photo.
Stay was founded by entrepreneur Joachim Paasche, PhD, after a previous successful exit in the travel space. I am hugely grateful to Joachim for the opportunity he offered me with Stay. I am also grateful for the guidance provided by Gunnar and Simona at Braganza.
Unfold played an important role in defining the foundation for Stay, in particular Eric, Marita, and Egil. They also made sure Stay.com received an award for Design Excellence by the Norwegian Design Council.
We received attention from some of the world's largest publishers, including Forbes, New York Times, and TIME, as well as technology press like Techcrunch and the Next Web.
By late 2016, Stay had reached 1,000,000 app installs, and 500,000 signed-up travelers.
Half of the travelers had created personal city guides, with friends or by themselves. Half of them had offlined a city. When traveling, people would use the app on average 11 times daily. Our most enthusiastic travelers had visited 30 cities with the help of Stay, and used the app more than 3,000 times.
A lack of business opportunities forced Stay to close its doors early 2017. The entire team were offered positions at the world's largest travel companies.
The Stay.com domain has since been sold, and the current Stay.com has nothing to do with this project.
