Alpaca Travel
Creator.

Alpaca Travel is a Melbourne-based independent company focused on reshaping the world of itinerary technology. They provide an all-encompassing service, facilitating the creation and display of trips, trails, and curated lists. Empowering users to structure on-ground movements, demonstrate maps and much more. Their tools simplify the task of presenting itineraries for designers and developers, as well as the creation of travel plans, bookmarks, and favourites for users.

As we were operating in a truly agile manner, this is not documentation of a single project. It is a series of feature releases from 2022 and 2023, as part of the version 2.0 of the Alpaca Creator that we developed together.

Co-founder and Lead Developer, Tom and I feel into a rhythm of working that generally flowed as follows:

• Initial scoping discussions (Tom operated as the Product Owner and managed the product backlog).
• Desktop research and ideation around potential solutions and approaches. Including reviews of previous unmoderated research if relevant.
• Hand-drawn wireframes (to speed up the process).
• Refinement discussions (with Tom and potentially other team members).
• UI Design and prototyping where relevant, using the existing pattern library extending it where necessary.
• Feedback and refinement.
• Final documentation ready for handover.
• Development and any relevant visual refinement.
• Unmoderated testing of new feature, to capture feedback or issues before releasing to all users.*

*Over time we developed a customer panel, with a small number of power users. Which we used for additional research and validation.

A major piece of work, which was the product of numerous conversations, saw Tom and I collaborating to conceive a fully self-serve CMS (the Creator) for version 2.0 of their platform. This was to be a full ground up rebuild, as version 1.0 of the platform was primarily used by internal teams to build projects for clients. Version 2.0 would be the first fully self-serve experience.

It wasn't a simple task for a mapping platform containing dozens of varied input types and data categories. This includes rich details for locations, such as opening hours, accessibility, and pricing, as well as trail and itinerary data that supports multi-leg, multi-day and multi-mode transport for an almost endless number of stops.

The nuances and layers involved in making decisions for this release are varied and not all are for public consumption. What I can share is that when working with a development team that is prepared to listen, be bold and take risks, amazing things can be achieved.

As the team at Alpaca shifted their offering from a hybrid of self-service with optional manual customisation by their team to a fully self-service model, the question of how to continue to offer a high degree of flexibility in the final embeds became crucial.

After numerous conversations and refinements, we were able to deliver a scalable approach to integrating a customer's 'look and feel' that went beyond basic colours and logos. This would allow for increasing complexity of customisation options without needing to make major changes to the management UI.

From my experience working on other CMS platforms, I've always been keen to implement nuanced styling.

Allowing end-users to craft rich variations of embeds that align with their own brands is a significant value addition. This is especially crucial for larger, well-established brands that prioritise consistency across their digital assets.

After the MVP release of the Creator, we worked with our panel and customers to look at some of the biggest gaps. One of the key issues was how embeds were managed.

We identify the major opportunity to provide much better visibility and live previewing, so that customers understood the selections they were making.

While preserving the simplicity of grabbing a link and sharing, we enhanced user capabilities, offering improved visibility and control over embed types and customisation options. Additionally, we provided a scaled-down live preview across various breakpoints, allowing users to see the effects of their selections without needing to embed first."

I love working on SaaS tools that push industry standards. For a small-team SaaS offering, I haven't encountered a CMS as rich and user-friendly.

While adding a (LLM) to your platform might be the flavour of the month, so much so it is bordering of cliche, when done with context and genuine customer value in mind, it becomes very powerful.

In this release, we focused on:

• Creating a brand tone of voice that can be saved.
• Giving Chat GPT context for the fields it was filling out to make results more relevant.
• Creating a better approach to version control and redos than the default single-threaded style of Chat GPT itself.
• Providing users with quick links to actions such as grammar and word count.

Like many tech-nerds who love being early adopters, this was a fantastic release to work on. It's exciting to ponder the potential of these new tools.

This was a relatively straightforward implementation of the tools. However, I believe we achieved the right functionality by intentionally constraining and enriching the context given to Chat GPT, thereby improving its utility for users.