Freedom Boat Club
Freedom Boat Club offers a responsive, desktop-to-mobile site inviting members to connect through social events, find training, access their accounts, and reserve available vessels at port locations.
overview
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product
We designed a modernized, accessible, and scalable digital platform that included:
🌊 A streamlined boat reservation system – Simplified booking flow, reducing friction and improving the user experience.
📅 Enhanced event registration & member dashboards – Centralized key information for easier access.
🔎 Improved information architecture – Made club resources, safety guidelines, and FAQs more intuitive to find.
📱 Mobile-friendly, accessible UI – Ensured a seamless experience across all devices, meeting WCAG accessibility standards. -
Problem
1️⃣ Complex Booking & Reservation System – Members needed a frictionless way to reserve boats, manage schedules, and check availability in real time.
2️⃣ Diverse User Base – The platform needed to cater to both tech-savvy members and those less familiar with digital tools, requiring a highly intuitive UX.
3️⃣ Scattered Content & Community Engagement – Club events, educational materials, and member communications were fragmented, making it difficult for users to find relevant information."
Beyond just updating the interface, my role was to simplify the entire experience, ensuring a balance between business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility.
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Solution
To guide our design decisions, I:
✔ Conducted stakeholder interviews & analyzed customer support trends to identify pain points in booking & engagement.
✔ Researched best-in-class reservation & community management systems to ensure usability best practices.
✔ Created user personas & journey maps to tailor the experience to different types of members.
✔ Worked closely with PMs & developers to ensure feasibility and smooth implementation.
✔ Led design reviews & working sessions with executives to align on vision and execution.Due to time constraints, we relied on iterative feedback loops with internal stakeholders rather than direct usability testing, refining designs through multiple review cycles before development.
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outcomes
Increased Member Engagement: The new platform saw a 40% uptick in member logins and interactions within the first three months post-launch.
Streamlined Reservations: Boat bookings became more efficient, with a 25% reduction in booking-related support inquiries, indicating improved user satisfaction.
Positive Feedback: Members praised the platform's intuitive design and valuable resources, leading to higher overall satisfaction and increased participation in club events.
If I had more time, I would have pushed for formal usability testing with real members to validate our assumptions before launch. However, this project reinforced my ability to translate business needs into user-friendly digital experiences, optimize booking workflows, and balance stakeholder expectations with practical UX solutions. These are skills I’m excited to bring to my next role.
process
Research & discovery
We first conducted a session with our client to establish the central idea of the project and to identify the following principles that support our designs while keeping in mind user goals, pain points, and business objectives:
Direct users and instill confidence.
Create a hassle-free experience.
Elicit an exclusive community while remaining inviting.
Ensure quality, safety and security.
Promote leisure and adventure.
Instill trust through accessibility.
insights & findings
From the user interviews and research, we gathered several insights:
Navigation Confusion: Users struggled to locate marinas and vessels due to poorly organized filters and unclear marina locations.
Error Handling: Inexperienced users often faced barriers when they encountered issues, such as missing required certificates. The error messages didn’t provide enough context to guide them toward a solution.
Time Constraints: Many users expressed that they didn’t have much time to complete a reservation, especially for spontaneous trips. This led to frustration when the platform made the process feel cumbersome or slow.
personas
To better understand their goals and pain points, we conducted user interviews with 15 current and prospective Freedom Boat Club members. Through this research, we developed four primary personas:
Working Weekday Boater: A user with flexible weekday availability who makes spontaneous, last-minute reservations when others are unlikely to be on the water.
Retired Club Regular: A frequent user who tries to maximize the number of reservations and is highly dependent on availability during off-peak hours.
Pleasure-Seeking Parent: This persona is focused on weekend trips with family or friends and values a simple, quick booking process to avoid frustration when planning outings.
Captain in Training: A weekend-only user who is committed to learning boating skills. This user is often pressed for time and requires a straightforward reservation process.
Secondary personas like Dock Staff and Prospective Members were also considered, particularly in how they interact with the system for managing reservations and helping users on-site.
design & development
Initial Wireframes & User Testing
We created wireframes focusing on simplifying the reservation flow. These wireframes were tested with five users representing the personas. Key feedback revealed that the location filters were not intuitive, and the error messages were still too vague. Users expressed a need for a faster way to select marina locations and vessel types without scrolling through long lists.
In response, we iterated on the design:
Enhanced Filtering Options: We improved the filters for location, time of day, and vessel capacity, giving them more prominence on the page. This allowed users to quickly narrow down their options and make a reservation faster.
Clear Error Messaging: We revamped the error messages to provide specific, actionable steps. For instance, if a user lacked a required certificate, the system would guide them to contact the appropriate marina for assistance or schedule a training session.
Usability Tests and Refinements
After incorporating the feedback, we conducted further usability testing. This round of testing showed improvements in overall ease of use and user satisfaction, though some users still requested more information about vessel availability. We then added a color-coded availability bar for each vessel, which provided a visual representation of when the vessel was available throughout the day.
Feedback & Iteration
Our client requested a responsive desktop to mobile experience, so we designed both desktop and mobile wireframes to account for all instances (Desktop view shown above). Our design principles, personas and findings led us to include features like:
Make a reservation
View upcoming reservations
Filter by location, date, time, vessel capacity, vessel type & vessel name
Weather widgets
Search by reciprocal port locations
Boat details including name, capacity, location and more
Boat availability by date and time of day
insights
boat club benefits
Among the top benefits of boat club membership are the ability to experience boating in many forms and the training made available by boat clubs.
club membership tradeoffs
In boating, there are many conditions outside the boater's control, and as club members, there are even more. Members are aware of the trade-offs, but there are opportunities to put more control in the hands of members that would improve the membership experience.
Reservations & Boat Availability
There are many specific online communities of boaters that prospective and current members consider vital resources to their experience as boaters. There's a fair amount of strategy required for boaters to get the reservation they want. Expert users or more seasoned members tend to know their way around club rules and the tricks of the system.
strength of online communities
There are many specific online communities of boaters that prospective and current members consider vital resources to their experience as boaters.
unnecessary analog process
Members and dock staff are still relying on analog (i.e., pen and paper, solutions) to manage reservations
Getting out on the water is often a stressful process with a lot of planning followed by moments of peace, relaxation or excitement.
Outcomes
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Happiness & task success (HEART)
Happiness
Users reported greater satisfaction, particularly appreciating the simplified transition between desktop and mobile.Engagement
The streamlined flow increased engagement, with users spending less time to complete purchases.Adoption
More users successfully completed Wi-Fi purchases on mobile devices.Task Success
The time to purchase Wi-Fi decreased, and the number of successful transactions increased. -
Reflections
This project taught me the importance of progressive disclosure, providing the right amount of information at the right time to avoid overwhelming users. I also learned the value of continuous iteration; through frequent testing, we were able to refine the design and deliver a more intuitive, high-impact solution. In future projects, I aim to incorporate similar user-focused methodologies to enhance the overall experience.