Drew Todahl

Drew Todahl

Drew Todahl

Open Road Rentals

Book the perfect vehicle for your next adventure!

Open Road Rentals

Book the perfect vehicle for your
next adventure!

A smartphone screen displays an app ad featuring a woman standing by a van, smiling outdoors. Text promotes curated rentals and campsites, with a button labeled Learn More and a prompt to download the app.

Overview

Services

Sole UX Designer

Industry

Outdoor

Date

Oct. 03, 2025

Open Road Rentals, an outdoor vehicle rental responsive website was created as a UX/UI case study for the Google UX Professional Certificate program. As a lover of the outdoors, I designed this app as a one-stop-shop for outdoor vehicle rentals.

My role as the sole UX Designer encompassed everything from research to design and development. 

Problem

Outdoor adventurers looking to rent outdoor vehicles for weekend trips or longer excursions often face confusion when coordinating vehicle rentals with suitable campsite bookings. Existing platforms fail to offer a seamless, all-in-one planning experience.

Solution

Design a responsive web app that allows outdoor enthusiasts to easily compare and book both vehicle rentals and compatible campsites – all in one place. This streamlined approach simplifies trip planning and fills a gap in the current market.

1

Research

2

Personas & User Flows

3

Initial Designs

4

Refining the Design

5

Deliverables

6

Key Takeaways

A comparison table of three companies—Outdoorsy, RVshare, Campendium—showcases features like rentals, user interface, booking, and campsites with a clear content structure planning approach using check marks and dashes for feature availability.

Competitive Audit

To begin the research process, a competitive audit of three competitors was performed to asses their strength and weaknesses.

User Research Study

To gain deeper insights into the key features and pain points a user survey was conducted on 8 participants. The target audience was adults ages 25-70 who enjoy the outdoors.

A table titled User Survey: Open Road Rentals shows features ranked by importance, average ranking scores, key insights, and findings from user testing, including search filters, booking, insurance, customer support, and more.

User Insights

Comparison tools

Provide comprehensive filtering and sorting options.

Campsite booking

Allow users the ability to book campsites compatible for their selected vehicle.

Simplicity

Need for a simple, streamlined booking process.

Vehicle Information

Provide sufficient vehicle information.

A user-focused persona profile for Emily Carter, a 32-year-old freelance graphic designer in Seattle, featuring her bio, goals, frustrations, tech literacy, payment method, platform preferences, and content structure planning—with her smiling portrait on the left.

Persona

A persona, Emily Carter, was created based on interview insights. Representing the group of users and their challanges.

Journey Map

Before sketching individual screens, a user journey map was created to track Emily’s progress throughout the application. 

Journey map for Emily Carter, featuring a user-focused content design—a line graph of her emotions across six stages of booking and using a vehicle service, with related tasks, improvement opportunities, and website organization structure annotated below.
A website sitemap flowchart is essential for content structure planning, showing the homepage linked to Search, Browse, Become a Host, Help, Log-in/Sign-up, and Footer/Other—each with their own subcategories like filters, destinations, and account actions.

Sitemap

It was time to focus on the sites hierarchy. A sitemap was created to capture all aspects of the features that I aimed to include.

Wireframes & Low-Fidelity Prototype

With pen and paper, I drafted wireframes using crazy 8’s that were then refined and translated into a low-fidelity prototype using Figma. Interactivity was added to the low-fidelity Prototype for testing purposes.

A complex UI wireframe flowchart showing multiple interconnected app screens with various layouts containing graphs, charts, buttons, and navigation elements, illustrating a user journey through features with clear site structure and scalable information architecture.
A script for Open Road Rentals features user-focused content design with four prompts guiding users to create a profile, browse and book vehicles, and review bookings. A System Usability Scale section supports user testing by rating the overall experience.

Usability Testing

Two remote usability studies were conducted with a 5 participants in each study. Results from these tests prompted the following modifications:

  • More information needed to be added to the pick-up/delivery process, causing users confusion.
  • Mobile header menu needed more of a margin as it was not entirely below the fold.
  • The browse tab needed to include campsites.

Design System

Created a design system for uniformity in the final designs. The design system followed Google’s material design and WCAG 2.0 guidelines to ensure compliance.

A UI design system with button styles, dropdowns, chips, icons, nav elements, and a color palette in green, brown, gray, and black on white ensures design consistency and allows for easy content updates.
An accessible typography system guide displaying font styles and sizes for headings, paragraphs, and list items using the Inter font family in different weights, from bold 48px for H1 to regular 20px for list items.

Final Designs

After iterating on the feedback receive during testing and implementing the design system a final prototype was designed.

Accessibility Considerations

A Use Contrast tool overlays a webpage, displaying color codes and a contrast ratio of 7.0 (AAA rating)—ideal for WCAG compliance. The background is beige with black text that reads Choose your vehicle and description underneath.

Color Contrast

To ensure compliance with WCAG 2.0 for color contrast, I created an accessible color palette using Figma’s “Use Contrast” plugin.

Text Hierarchy

Text hierarchy was created and implemented for users to easily distinguish between different sections and types of information, while also providing a clear structure for screen readers.

An accessible typography system guide displaying font styles and sizes for headings, paragraphs, and list items using the Inter font family in different weights, from bold 48px for H1 to regular 20px for list items.
A parked Winnebago RV with its awning extended, set up on grass at a campsite. Outdoor chairs and picnic table are nearby. Listing is detailed with WCAG compliance alt-text for accessible website design. 2012 Winnebago, Class C, sleeps 8, 34ft, Eugene, OR, $250/night.

Alternative Text

I created alt-text for all images, to support developers and users with screen readers, ensuring a more accessible experience for individuals with visual impairments.

Final Thoughts

While creating the Open Road Rentals responsive website, I learned the importance of user feedback. Understanding that this web application is for the user and should reflect their needs goals, and feedback. While it can be hard to separate myself emotionally from the design it is needed and beneficial for the end user.