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Forest Holidays
Redesigning the cabin booking experience to reduce abandonment and increase conversion across web and mobile.
Redesigning the cabin booking experience to reduce abandonment and increase conversion across web and mobile.
Visual designs and proprietary data cannot be shared under the terms of this engagement. The process, contributions, and outcomes documented here reflect my actual work on this project.
Forest Holidays is a premium UK cabin holiday company offering forest retreats across 11 UK locations. Their existing booking flow was causing significant drop-off — users were exiting at high rates during the date selection and cabin configuration steps.
The business needed to understand why conversion was suffering and design a solution that worked for both first-time bookers and returning guests across a wide demographic range. I was brought in to lead research and design from discovery through to developer handoff.
Before touching a single wireframe, I needed to understand where and why users were failing — using both quantitative data and direct user contact.
Six months of funnel data revealed 52% of users who reached the date-selection step did not progress further. Mobile exit rate was 3× that of desktop — a clear signal the mobile experience was fundamentally broken.
Conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with a mix of existing customers and lapsed visitors. Key themes: confusion with the availability calendar, uncertainty about what was included in pricing, and distrust in the displayed total cost.
Evaluated the existing booking flow against Nielsen's 10 heuristics. Found critical failures in error prevention, system status visibility, and inconsistent UI patterns between steps in the funnel.
Benchmarked against Airbnb, Canopy & Stars, and Hoseasons. Forest Holidays required 4–5 additional interactions vs. competitors to complete an equivalent booking — and surfaced pricing significantly later in the journey.
"I couldn't tell if the cabin was actually available for my dates — I just assumed it wasn't and left."— Research participant, 42, returning customer
Research findings were turned into shared artefacts so the entire team — design, product, and engineering — could align on the real problem before solutionising.
The "Escaping Parent" (35–50, group family booking, price-sensitive, time-poor) and the "Couple's Retreat" (28–45, flexible dates, experience-focused, willing to pay premium). These two profiles shaped every subsequent design decision.
Full journey from Google search to post-booking confirmation email, with friction points and emotional scores mapped at each step. The pain cluster at the availability calendar step was immediately visible — a flat-line of frustration across both personas.
"Forest Holidays guests need to understand cabin availability and total pricing within a single, confident interaction — because the current separation of these two pieces of information creates doubt that drives abandonment."
The design process moved through four rounds of iteration, with real users involved at every stage — never treating testing as a sign-off ritual.
Three competing approaches to the availability interaction were sketched and tested in paper prototype sessions with 5 participants. A combined date-range picker with inline pricing won — users reported feeling "in control" for the first time.
Clickable Figma prototype tested with 6 participants across desktop and mobile. Critical finding: mobile users needed a bottom-sheet date picker pattern, not a full modal. The modal created a disorienting loss of context. Iterated within 24 hours.
Full Figma prototype with a comprehensive component library. All booking states documented: available, partially available, sold out, restricted (min-night rules). Responsive variants for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Accessibility reviewed against WCAG 2.1 AA.
Task: "Book a 3-night cabin for 4 adults in August." Task completion rate improved from 41% (original) to 87% (new design) across 8 participants. Confidence ratings — "I know exactly what I'm getting" — improved by 62 points on a 0–100 scale.
Reduction in booking abandonment in the 60 days post-launch
Improvement in mobile booking conversion rate vs. prior period
Net Promoter Score increase across post-booking satisfaction surveys
Developer handoff was managed via fully annotated Figma files and a component library with all states, interactions, and responsive behaviour documented. I ran two QA sessions with the engineering team during the build phase to ensure implementation fidelity — particularly critical for the mobile date-picker interaction which had subtle gesture behaviour that documentation alone couldn't communicate.
Post-launch, the team tracked metrics against a baseline established during the define phase. The 25% abandonment reduction target was exceeded within the first month. The mobile conversion improvement represented a significant revenue impact for a channel that had previously been written off internally as "not our audience."
Automotive · Training Platform · 2022