Stellar Travel

Stellar Travel's app did everything: flights, stays, cars, activities, loyalty, chat. It did all of it from a home screen with fourteen entry points, and the analytics showed almost everybody using two of them.

The engagement was to find out what the app was actually for, and then let it be that.

One trip, one thread

The reframing that unlocked the project was treating a trip as a single object with a timeline, rather than as a folder of unrelated bookings. Everything a person does in the app now attaches to a trip and appears in the order it will happen.

That change removed four navigation levels. Search, booking and the boarding pass are the same surface at different points in time, which is how travellers already think about it.

Designed for one hand, on a train, offline

The real conditions were built into the constraints: every primary action within thumb reach, every screen legible in sunlight at maximum brightness, and everything needed on the day of travel cached and readable with no signal.

The last of those drove more decisions than anything else. A screen that has to work offline cannot lean on a live price, a map tile or a spinner, and the version that survives those restrictions is better on a good connection too.

What changed

Bookings completed on mobile rose by just under a quarter and the average number of screens between opening the app and confirming a trip fell from nine to five. Ratings moved a full point.

The trip object also turned out to be the foundation for the features the roadmap had been struggling to place, which is usually the sign that the model is right.