Luxury Escapes - App Rebrand & Onboarding

Overview

Coinciding with a broader company-wide brand evolution, I led the redesign of the Luxury Escapes mobile app & app onboarding flow. The goal was to seamlessly introduce the updated design system and brand identity to mobile users, while capturing early intent to personalise the explore feed from day one.

Aligning visual identity with frictionless education & intent capture

The Impact

Unified Brand Experience: Successfully brought the app UI into full alignment with the modernized company brand, typography, and color palette.
Higher Intent Capture: Streamlined initial preference collection, leading to increased completion rates without adding drop-off friction.
Design System Scaling: Built updated tokenized UI components in Figma to accelerate future native app feature development.

The Challenge

The legacy app onboarding felt dated and disconnected from the upcoming brand direction. Additionally, new users were dropped directly into a generic home feed without any context, missing a critical opportunity to educate and tailor the experience to them, not capture irrelevant unused data.

Strategy & Execution

Without requiring extensive preliminary research, the focus was on UI execution, alignment, and heuristic improvements to first-time user experience:

AI Planning & Execution: Utilising Claude & Claude Design, I explored various approaches based on existing brand assets, with recommendations informed by real analytics surfaced through AI assisted data analysis.
Brand Translation: Applied the refined aesthetic, featuring rich typography, dark ocean teal green, and high-impact hero imagery, to set an elevated tone immediately upon launch.
Heuristic Streamlining: Kept the onboarding sequence light and scannable with an explicit "Skip" pathway to prevent drop-offs for eager shoppers, while providing kean users to vital product information.

Without requiring extensive preliminary research, the focus was on UI execution, alignment, and heuristic improvements to first-time user experience:

AI Planning & Execution: Utilising Claude & Claude Design, I explored various approaches based on existing brand assets, with recommendations informed by real analytics surfaced through AI assisted data analysis.
Brand Translation: Applied the refined aesthetic, featuring rich typography, dark ocean teal green, and high-impact hero imagery, to set an elevated tone immediately upon launch.
Heuristic Streamlining: Kept the onboarding sequence light and scannable with an explicit "Skip" pathway to prevent drop-offs for eager shoppers, while providing kean users to vital product information.

Flow & Interaction Design

Welcome & Value Props: Clean hero layout introducing tailored offers across hotels, flights, tours, and cruises with a high-contrast primary CTA.
Intent & Preference Capture: A visual "Top Destinations" grid allowing users to select preferred regions (e.g., Australia, Bali, Maldives) to immediately inform their personalized feed, aided by location data.
Value-Add Explanation: Highlighting exclusive benefits (like Limited-Time LUX Exclusives and bonus inclusions) to build immediate brand trust before feed entry.
Loyalty & Membership Education: Introduce users to the loyalty and premium membership experiences without overwhelming them with details, just benefits. Allow users to activate both for free to prevent friction, and ensure a skip pathway always available.

Welcome & Value Props: Clean hero layout introducing tailored offers across hotels, flights, tours, and cruises with a high-contrast primary CTA.
Intent & Preference Capture: A visual "Top Destinations" grid allowing users to select preferred regions (e.g., Australia, Bali, Maldives) to immediately inform their personalized feed, aided by location data.
Value-Add Explanation: Highlighting exclusive benefits (like Limited-Time LUX Exclusives and bonus inclusions) to build immediate brand trust before feed entry.
Loyalty & Membership Education: Introduce users to the loyalty and premium membership experiences without overwhelming them with details, just benefits. Allow users to activate both for free to prevent friction, and ensure a skip pathway always available.

Design System Integration

Working with the Design System Lead, we established the refresh to support broader platform and system consistency:

Standardised mobile cards, bottom sheets, search inputs, and primary/secondary button states.
Implemented tokenised typography hierarchies and colour to ensure accessibility and crisp display across varying screen sizes.
Created scalable, reusable Figma components to streamline design handoff for future app releases.