Shaka Guide - Hawaiʻi + U.S. National Parks
Ten Years of Story Telling
Shaka Guide turns rental-car road trips into guided stories, GPS-triggered narration about the landmarks you're driving past, throughout the Hawaiian Islands and, now, the National Parks beyond them. We rebuilt their flagship iOS app and built their commerce website from scratch, so the story and the sale finally live in one connected system.
The Challenge
Shaka Guide's iOS app had grown organically over years of new tours and features, which meant it had also drifted from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines in ways that quietly cost the team trust and App Store visibility. Working closely with founders Andrew and Rita, who talk to Shaka Guide customers constantly and knew exactly where people got stuck, we ran a full compliance audit and compiled a requirements list grounded in real customer feedback, not guesswork. On the commerce side, there was no real website to speak of, just a way to browse and buy tour bundles, with no home for the itinerary content, local stories, and articles that actually convince someone to trust a stranger's voice in their car for six hours.
The Results
We partnered with Shaka Guide's in-house illustrator to define a new art direction and carried it through the redesigned iOS app, bringing every screen back in line with HIG while keeping the brand's warm, personal feel. Then we built the commerce website from the ground up, a blog-forward site where tourism articles and itinerary content pull readers in, then link directly into the audio tour bundles those stories are about. Buy a bundle on the web, and it's ready and waiting the moment you open the app. A decade later, Shaka Guide has extended that same model of storytelling to National Parks across the mainland, and just celebrated ten years in business. Congrats to founders Andrew and Rita.
Years of Shaka Guide storytelling, from island backroads to National Parks
Connected service lines: website redesign, iOS app redesign, commerce, blog
Platforms rebuilt in tandem so the story and the sale finally live in one system
