Travel Mobile App : First-Time Booking Experience
Modern travel apps give users access to thousands of destinations, stays, and booking options but that abundance often comes at the cost of clarity. New users often abandon the booking process due to overwhelming choices, complex filters, and unclear pricing, turning what should be an exciting experience into a stressful one. For solo travelers in particular, the first booking moment is critical in determining trust and long-term engagement with a travel app.
How might we design a mobile travel booking experience that guides first-time users from discovery to confirmation with confidence, reducing decision fatigue, improving transparency, and enabling a successful booking in just a few steps?
Hi- Fidelity Mockup
Project background and Personal Journey
Travel planning is often exciting in theory but overwhelming in practice, especially for first-time users of mobile travel apps. Many existing experiences prioritize scale and options over clarity, leading to decision fatigue, unclear pricing, and drop-offs before booking completion. This project focuses on redesigning the first-time booking experience for a travel mobile app, with the goal of simplifying discovery, improving transparency, and guiding users toward a confident booking through a streamlined, mobile-first flow.
I took on this project to strengthen my end-to-end product design skills by working through a realistic, ambiguity-driven problem space. From competitive analysis to flow definition and interface design, I focused on making intentional trade-offs that reduce cognitive load while preserving trust and usability. This process helped me shift from designing individual screens to thinking more holistically about user behavior, decision-making, and how thoughtful UX choices can directly influence completion and confidence.
The Problem
First-time users of travel mobile apps often abandon the booking process before completion due to overwhelming choices, complex filtering systems, and a lack of upfront pricing transparency. Instead of feeling guided, users are forced to make multiple high-stakes decisions with limited context, leading to confusion, hesitation, and loss of trust during the discovery-to-payment journey.
As a result, what should be an intuitive and exciting experience becomes cognitively demanding, reducing user confidence and increasing drop-off before a successful booking is completed.