Balkan Transfer

2023 / Based on Bosnia and Herzegovina

Role: UI/UX Lead

Balkan Transfer enables travelers to book airport transfer services with outbound and return legs, configure passengers and extras, and receive structured tickets for drivers. The service is used by both one-time and repeat travelers who need clarity, speed, and confidence when committing to a booking.

The redesign focused on improving the booking experience for the public-facing web platform and consolidating the booking flow into a more intuitive, predictable, and efficient process.

Problem

Airport transfer booking requires users to coordinate routes, dates, times, passengers, extras, and price while dealing with limited information. This often leads to hesitation, trial-and-error behavior, and low booking confidence—especially for first-time users. Airport transfer bookings require users to coordinate timing, passenger selection, extras, and final cost without perfect information. This led to hesitation, trial-and-error behavior, and low booking confidence — especially for first-time users. Airport transfer booking requires users to coordinate outbound and return legs, select passengers, configure extras, and commit without perfect information. The critical decisions (route availability, pricing, extras, passenger composition, return timing) all happen under uncertainty. Users typically do not know feasibility until after they try, causing hesitation and repeated trial-and-error behaviors.

The previous platform treated the booking experience like a static form instead of a travel decision. Key frictions included:

- Low visibility on availability and feasibility
- Repeated data entry for frequent travelers
- No ability to modify or cancel bookings without calling support
- No visibility into driver & vehicle details prior to the ride
- No post management, causing dependency on customer service for small changes
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What We Found

Across stakeholders and competitor audits we observed three recurring pain themes:

1. Low availability visibility → users only learned feasibility after form submission
2. Heavy configuration effort → many fields and steps, with little support for shortcuts or reuse
3. Repeated input effort → frequent travelers re-entered the same passenger & extras data every time

Insight

Users think in terms of their trip, not in terms of individual fields.
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They expect the system to:

- Remember frequently reused passenger details
- Keep configuration manageable
- Make feasibility and pricing clear before they commit

Strategy

We reframed the experience from “fill forms → submit” to “resolve decisions → commit”.
The strategy focused on:

- Reducing uncertainty early
- Structuring decisions in a logical, step-by-step flow
- Preserving user effort by reusing information instead of asking for it again
- Extend support beyond checkout by enabling post-booking changes without customer service involvement

AI-Enabled Workflow

AI assisted in synthesizing competitor research, clustering pain points, generating persona scaffolds, and iterating UX writing variants.

This reduced time spent on mechanical documentation and gave us more space to focus on flow-level decisions and feasibility alignment with engineering and product stakeholders.

Collaboration & Ownership

Role: Lead Product Designer
Team: Junior UX/UI, Head of Design, Product Manager, Engineering, Client stakeholders
Workflow: Research → IA → Wireframes → UI → Spec → Handoff
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I led design for the whole website and moile applications while collaborating with the team on review cycles and refinements.

Outcome

Shipped V1:
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- Full redesign of the public website
- Full design of the mobile apps
- Unified extras configuration
- Reusable passenger profiles
- Improved UX writing and system feedback
- Structured ticket information for drivers
- Added "My booking" section for post-purchase management
- Enabled users to view driver & vehicle details before the ride
- Enabled editing and cancelling bookings through the system instead of phone support

Expected qualitative impact

- Reduced trial-and-error searches
- Less repeated data entry for return users
- Clearer booking comprehension and pricing transparency
- Lower support dependency for basic booking questions
- Increased self-service resolution (fewer modifications handled via phone)
- Higher booking confidence due to visible pre-ride information (driver, vehicle, timing)
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