WhatSUP
Making it easier to choose an adventure and get to the booking.
Making booking the easy part.
An outdoor booking platform for paddleboarding, kayaking, lessons, and tours on Bowen Island.
Different activities, pricing, and requirements made the booking experience easy to overcomplicate.
I started with the structure — separating activities around what people came to do.
A clearer path from choosing an activity to completing a booking.
People come for the activity, not the booking process.
Finding the right activity took too much figuring out.
Pricing and requirements appeared after users had already started deciding.
Rentals, lessons, and tours weren't clearly separated.
How quickly can someone go from
“I want to do this” to “I know what to book”?
People usually arrive with an idea of what they want to do. Finding it shouldn't take much work.
Activities, pricing, requirements, and booking details weren't always clear at the right moment.
Make the website do more of the figuring out for them.
There wasn't an existing product to fix.
WhatSUP started from a brief, so I first needed to understand what a good outdoor booking experience should include.
Competitive analysis
I compared five outdoor booking platforms, looking for patterns in navigation, trust, seasonal content, and booking.
I wasn't looking for what to copy, I wanted to understand what worked and why.
SEPARATE THE ACTIVITIES
Rentals, lessons, and tours needed their own clear paths.
SHOW TRUST EARLY
Reviews, photos, and pricing worked better before the booking decision.
THINK BEYOND SUMMER
The structure needed to work even when seasonal activities changed.
KEEP BOOKING CLOSE
Once someone was ready, they shouldn't have to search for the next step.
These patterns gave me a starting point for the structure.
Separate activities based on what people came to do.
Show pricing, reviews, and requirements while people are deciding.
Let activities change without rebuilding the structure.
Make the next step obvious once someone is ready.
Before designing pages, I worked out where everything belonged.
Information Architecture
Grouping activities around user intent.
Site Map
Turning those groups into navigation.
Content Inventory
Defining what each page actually needed.
Structure first. Visuals later.
I used low-fi wireframes to see whether people could find an activity and move toward booking without getting lost.
Testing showed us where people were still getting stuck.
Before User Testing
Activities blurred together, navigation wasn't always clear, and waivers appeared too late.
After User Testing
We separated activities, simplified key actions, and moved important requirements earlier.
EASIER TO START
Clearer activity categories made it easier to know where to go.
FEWER SURPRISES
Pricing and requirements appeared earlier in the process.
BUILT TO CHANGE
Seasonal activities could change without changing how the site worked.
Starting with the structure made everything after it easier. Once rentals, lessons, tours, and their information had a clear place, the interface didn't need to explain as much.
I'd want to test it with real booking behavior. Our usability testing showed where people became confused, but live data could show where they actually leave the flow.
Competitive analysis became less about what others were doing and more about why they were doing it. That helped me decide which patterns actually made sense for WhatSUP instead of simply following them.