Outdoorsy

Research

The research included 15 host interviews across the U.S., eight surveys, six usability tests, and 42 support-ticket data points, alongside interviews with product, brand, marketing, mobile, and design leaders. The findings highlighted control, communication, education, trust, time, pride, and protection.

These findings set the priorities. Three in ten new hosts left the platform within a year, and nearly half of those never received a qualified booking request; churn peaked four weeks after a first listing. The listing flow was completing a third of the time, and hosts leaned on support calls to finish it. A third of cancellations came inside forty-eight hours of booking, and more than a quarter of last-minute cancellations were maintenance. Hosts were running key exchanges, instruction guides and renter vetting off the platform because the product gave them nowhere to do it.

Six host archetypes came out of it: the newcomer with one rig and a day job, the super host building packages, the business on its way to pro, the risk-averse owner protecting an expensive asset, the enterprise fleet that never meets a renter, and the casually engaged owner with a listing and no booking. They set the scope for what the tools had to do.

From finding to roadmap

Churn at four weeks and a third-completed listing flow put listing first on the roadmap, with the guidance hosts were getting from coach calls built into the product. Maintenance-driven cancellations put the calendar second, so a host could block a vehicle before a booking sealed. Off-platform key exchanges and renter vetting put messaging third. Analytics came last, for the hosts who wanted to run it as a business.

Bonfire, the system

The pattern library starts with atomic components: colors, text styles, and spacing tokens. These combine into larger patterns, including modals, carousels, and forms.

A master set of Figma Tokens publishes to Style Dictionary. Token changes reach both Figma components and production code through GitHub.

The documentation gives designers, developers, and product managers one place to find guidelines, process notes, and quick references. The system was a finalist in the 2023 zeroheight Design System of the Year awards.

A new set of tokens adapted the core system for Roamly, with component libraries for iOS, Android, and web.

From tokens to every experience

Figma Tokens provide the source of truth. Style Dictionary transforms them for each platform, and GitHub maintains version history. The web app, iOS app, Android app, email, and marketing site consume those tokens.

View the pipeline diagram · View the system overview · View the outcomes board

What it was for

The system aimed to help teams ship faster, give hosts a consistent experience, and make navigation and workflows clearer. Every designer and engineer adopted it, and it later extended to Roamly and glamping.