Wayfarer Travel

Context

Loved by power users. Bouncing first-time visitors. The studio brief: redesign onboarding for a niche travel-planning product, and open the front door without disrupting any expert flow.

Approach

Mapped the dual-audience problem, prototyped a progressive-disclosure onboarding, and validated with five rounds of usability testing. Each round named a specific shift. Round 2 moved the entry from a global tour to a destination-first prompt after power users read the tour as friction and first-timers read it as a guess at where to start. Round 4 cut onboarding from six steps to three after a tree-test showed steps four and five were where first-timers bailed. Round 5 added a 'skip for now' affordance on the questionnaire the experts had already been ignoring.

Designed to test

A progressive-disclosure onboarding for a dual-audience product, designed against a constraint of zero disruption for power users while opening the front door for first-time visitors.

What good looks like

Good looks like: first-time-visitor task completion improves measurably in usability rounds against the current product. Power users complete their canonical flow in the same step count or fewer. Every testing round names a specific shift, not 'general improvements.' The progressive disclosure holds under stress without nagging the experts.

Live site