Checkout Redesign

Streamlining Brightline’s checkout to reduce friction and boost conversions.

Overview:
The Brightline Train ticket booking website faces significant user experience challenges during the checkout process, resulting in frequent customer complaints and high booking abandonment.
This project aims to streamline the checkout experience, enhance user satisfaction, reduce booking abandonment, and increase successful ticket purchases.

Outcome:

We thoroughly identified users' pain points through multiple approaches, defined the core problems, and delivered solutions that enhanced the product—resulting in a 1.35% annual revenue lift and a 3.12% increase in checkout conversion rate.

My role: Research, UI/UX design

Timeline: 8 weeks

Defining Problems

01

Gorilla Testing

Excessive Steps Create Friction

Users expect checkout to be quick and linear. The current step-by-step flow with repeated confirmations slows them down, adds mental effort, and breaks momentum—leading to frustration or drop-off.

02

Heatmap Study

Misleading UI Triggers Rage Clicks

Step indicators look clickable but aren’t, leading users to click repeatedly out of confusion. This breaks trust and makes the interface feel buggy or unresponsive.

03

Stakeholder Meeting

Dense Policies Are Ignored

Important policy are buried in unscannable text at the end of checkout, so users often miss them. This leads to misunderstandings post-purchase, reduced perceived value, and more customer support issues.

Design Goal

Design a checkout experience that delivers clarity, speed, and a sense of control by aligning with users’ mental models—prioritizing linear flow, consistent interactions, and cognitive ease.

The Solutions

01

Eliminate Unnecessary Clicks

We identified that only the first step (guest info) needs to stand alone, as this information carries through the rest of the process. The remaining three steps can be shown together to reduce unnecessary confirmation clicks and streamline the flow.

02

Revisit UI Design

We removed misleading visuals like clickable-looking step indicators and unnecessary imagery in the "Extra" section to reduce cognitive load. The flattened design creates a cleaner, more consistent experience across the flow.

03

Revisit Policy Text

Important policies and benefits were previously buried and hard to read. We've restructured the text into itemized bullet points with checkmarks to improve scannability and reassure users at the point of purchase.

Takeaway

This project reinforced how essential it is to align design decisions with real user behavior. Through heatmaps, interviews, and stakeholder input, I learned that:

Progressive disclosure isn't always better—over-segmentation can harm momentum in time-sensitive flows like checkout.
Visual clarity matters more than aesthetics—elements that look interactive but aren’t can break trust and cause frustration.
Policy and legal content must be designed, not just displayed—clear structure and scannability are key to delivering critical information.

Overall, great UX requires balancing user expectations, technical constraints, and business needs—all grounded in evidence, not assumption.