From Overload to Optimization: How a Strategic Redesign Increased Bookings.
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Sole UX/UI designer
Figma, Miro
1 designer and developer
Oct 2024 – Jan 2025 (14 weeks)
The app, designed for beginner and intermediate freedivers, had a basic onboarding process consisting of four monotonous questions. While functional, it lacked engagement and failed to highlight the app’s core value early in the user journey.
The goal was to redesign the onboarding experience to create a more polished, professional first impression—one that immediately conveyed value and ultimately increased user activation and conversions.
To create a more dynamic and psychologically engaging onboarding experience, I applied key UX principles and onboarding best practices:
- Instead of overwhelming users with too much information at once, the onboarding reveals relevant details progressively, ensuring each step is easy to digest.
- The process starts with goal-setting, which personalizes the experience early on and sets user expectations.
Social Proof: Reinforcement screen with user testimonials and ratings reassures credibility and impact.
Achievement Framing: The onboarding highlights potential performance improvements, leveraging users’ intrinsic motivation.
Dynamic Selection UI: Static multiple-choice questions were redesigned into interactive selections with visual feedback.
Accessibility: The UI maintains high readability and usability across devices.
Redesigning an onboarding experience is not just about making it look good—it’s about guiding the user towards an ‘Aha! Moment’ as smoothly as possible while ensuring engagement and conversion. To achieve this, I followed a structured process that combined competitor analysis, user psychology research, and iterative design testing.
Before making any changes, I analysed onboarding flows from dozens of apps, both within and outside the breathing and wellness industry. The goal was to identify common patterns, best practices, and potential pitfalls that could inform my decisions.
These are my learnings and findings:
Based on these findings, the onboarding now includes improved goal-based question, a testimonial reinforcement screen, and intuitive question formats to encourage completion.
Onboarding is as much about persuasion as it is about usability. I incorporated psychological principles such as:
Loss Aversion → Most people don’t realize they’re using only a fraction of their lung capacity. By highlighting this untapped potential (e.g., “Unlock the other 70% of your breathing power”), we create a sense of urgency and motivation to take action. For this task, I analysed and reviewed studies on the importance of freediving on health, sports performance and other aspects of life.
Commitment Bias → The journey starts with small, meaningful choices—selecting a goal, setting a personal challenge—making users feel more invested in their progress from the very first interaction.
Social Proof → Seeing real people improve their breath-holding ability and overall performance through the app reassures new users that they, too, can achieve remarkable results.
The new onboarding screens are already in production, and we will first measure their impact on key metrics before moving on to activation optimisation.
I will update the case study once we have data that answers the following questions:
In this project I have learned a lot about emotional triggers, onboarding and paywalls. I really enjoyed it because of the type of project, related to the world of fitness and sport, as well as the psychological part.
In addition, I was able to use my previous experience in sales pages and persuasive texts to realise that they apply in a similar way to apps as they do to websites.
I am looking forward to continue learning about activation in this next stage.
Once this data is collected, the next phase will focus on activation improvements, ensuring that more users move from downloading the app to experiencing their first real training session—an essential step in driving long-term engagement and retention.
Below I am sharing some test screens – not finished – that I am trying out as an initial part of the onboarding.
A complete UX/UI overhaul for a surf school, simplifying navigation, clarifying pricing, and optimizing the booking flow to increase reservations and reduce drop-offs.