Aiman Fakia
Staff Product Designer
Case Study 01 — Wanderlust Travel Platform
Designing better guest experiences for millions of travellers.
A two-year redesign of the booking, discovery and guest-support experience — reframing fragmented flows into one coherent system that scaled across web, native and partner surfaces.
Read Case Study
Role
Staff UX Designer
Timeline
2024 — 2026
Company
Wanderlust
Team
6 designers · 14 eng
Impact
+18% conversion
01 — Executive Summary
One coherent system that turned hesitation into confident bookings.
By consolidating booking, discovery and support into a single design language, the team removed friction at every decision point — measurably lifting conversion while cutting the support burden that came from confusing states.
+18%
Increase in booking conversion across web and native.
−42%
Fewer support tickets from unclear booking and error states.
+12
Net Promoter Score improvement within two release cycles.
02 — The Challenge
Fragmented flows were quietly costing bookings.
Three product teams had shipped overlapping booking flows with no shared model. Guests faced inconsistent states, unclear pricing and dead-ends on mobile — and every inconsistency translated into abandoned sessions and a rising volume of support contacts.
Business context
Bookings plateaued while paid acquisition kept rising — growth depended on fixing the funnel, not buying more traffic.
Constraints
A live platform with millions of monthly users meant zero-downtime, incremental rollout and strict experimentation guardrails.
Technical limitations
Three legacy codebases and an aging design library with no shared tokens or components across surfaces.
Stakeholders
Aligning product, engineering, support, legal and partner teams around one shared definition of the guest journey.
03 — Research
We let evidence, not opinion, define the problem.
147
Guest interviews across 9 markets
Diary studies and moderated sessions surfaced where confidence broke down — pricing ambiguity, unclear availability, and fear of hidden fees.
Behavioural analytics
Funnel analysis pinpointed a 34% drop at the date-and-guest step.
Support data
Ticket mining showed 6 of 10 contacts traced to ambiguous states.
Competitive teardown
Benchmarked 11 platforms to map table-stakes versus differentiators.
Journey maps & personas
Three primary personas anchored the redesign and prioritisation.
04 — Product Strategy
Aligning what the business needs with what guests deserve.
Strategy meant making trade-offs explicit — sizing opportunities, sequencing bets, and committing to a single measure of success the whole org could rally behind.
Business goals
Lift booking conversion
Reduce cost-to-serve
Grow repeat bookings
User goals
Book with confidence
Clear pricing upfront
Recover from errors gracefully
Constraints & trade-offs
Ship incrementally on live traffic
Reuse before rebuild
Defer edge surfaces to phase 2
North-Star Metric
“Confident-booking rate” aligned every team behind one measure.
1 goal
05 — Design Principles
Five principles that resolved every hard decision.
01
Clarity
Every screen answers one question. No ambiguous state ever ships.
02
Trust
Pricing, availability and policies are honest, upfront and never buried.
03
Efficiency
The fastest path to a booking — sensible defaults, fewer steps, less typing.
04
Accessibility
WCAG AA as a floor — keyboard, contrast and screen-reader parity by default.
05
Scalability
One token system and shared components that scale across every surface.
Principles as a contract
Shared and referenced in every design review — so quality stayed consistent at scale.
06 — Exploration
From scattered screens to a single, calm flow.
We explored dozens of directions — sketches, wireframes and rejected concepts — before converging. Drag the handle to compare the legacy experience with the shipped redesign.
Sketches
Wireframes
12 rejected concepts
Shipped
07 — Final Solution
One booking system, beautifully consistent across every surface.
Booking confirmed in 3 taps
Guided booking flow
A single linear path with smart defaults replaced three competing flows.
Transparent pricing
All-in pricing shown upfront — no surprises at the final step.
Graceful recovery
Clear, reassuring states for every error, hold and edge condition.
08 — Design System
A token-driven system the whole org could build on.
Typography
Aa
Inter — interface & body
DM Serif Display — editorial accents
Colour
Spacing scale
Components & tokens
80+ documented components, semantic tokens and motion primitives — one source of truth across web, iOS and Android.
Buttons
Inputs
Cards
Motion tokens
Patterns
09 — Edge Cases
The states most teams skip — designed first.
Empty states
Loading
Errors
Offline
Permissions
Accessibility
Localization
Failure recovery
10 — Business Impact
Outcomes the whole business felt.
Booking conversion
+18%
Before vs after launch
Support tickets
−42%
Fewer contacts per 1k bookings
Net Promoter Score
+12
Sustained over two quarters
“The new flow feels effortless — I booked in under a minute and knew exactly what I was paying.”
— Verified guest, post-launch survey
2.3M
Guests on the new experience within the first quarter.
11 — Lessons Learned
“The hardest part wasn’t the interface. It was earning alignment — then protecting it under pressure.”
What worked
Committing to a single north-star metric early gave every team a shared way to resolve disagreements without escalating. Principles did the heavy lifting in reviews.
What I’d change next time
I’d invest in the design-system foundations a full quarter earlier. Retrofitting tokens mid-flight slowed the first two releases more than the redesign itself.
Next Case Study
AnswerBite — scaling AI-assisted support
How a support-first redesign cut resolution time and lifted CSAT.