Travel and live like a local

World’s #1 Home Exchange platform.

Industry

Travel

Location

United States

Overview

HomeExchange is a global leading platform for home swapping. It’s a vacation alternative where you stay at someone's home while they stay at yours, but not always simultaneously. With more than 65,000 home listings in 150 countries, HomeExchange is the industry leader for the past 15 years.

This L.A. based company partnered up with Q to build a dedicated development and design team to develop and support the growth of their business.

What we did

  • Web Platform
  • UX & UI Design
  • Quality Assurance

Tech stack

  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • HTML
  • CSS

Process

  1. Workshop

    The process started with the extensive on-site workshop in which we discovered the client’s major pain points and goals - remaining the leading exchange platform that is following world trends and adapting the UX for their user base of people older than 45.

    1

  2. Discovery Phase

    We gathered all the useful information about the processes in HomeExchange, pinpointed the user journey from all angles and did a research of their user base.

    2

  3. UX & Prototyping

    We created clickable wireframes using InVision and presented our solution to the board of directors.

    3

  4. Setting up an Agile Team

    After the approval of the initial wireframes, Q built a team of 7 front-end and back-end developers who will develop the platform.

    4

  5. Development

    Development lasted for 9 months and included integrations with CRM, ERP, and more than 50 other payment solutions. Now, the platform is being used at every corner of the world.

    5

  6. Support and Ongoing Development

    After the release of the final version of the platform, the dedicated team continued developing new features and upgrading the existing ones.

    6

  7. Exit

    HomeExchange did a successful exit in 2017 and was sold for $34 mil.

    7

Challenges

Moving all the development operations to Croatia

HomeExchange development team was initially dispersed in several different time-zones all over the world which proved to be ineffective. We centralized all of the development in Croatia under the one roof.

Building an easy-to-use solution that targets the audience older than 45

We started the process by forming the focus group which rated the UX and wireframes to get the matching layout and design of the platform.

Localization for 150 countries

We engaged several experts with an eCommerce experience in Asia, Europe, North and South America to help us bring HomeExchange closer to their users around the globe.

Conclusion

We were involved in the project inception and were in charge of the discovery, planning, architecture, UX & UI design, and implementation of the solution.

The final result was a platform that helped HomeExchange stay sector leader and have a successful exit worth $34 mil.

The team which developed the platform is still supporting HomeExchange in their growth and new business goals.

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