Wanderu is a Boston based travel startup focused on empowering users to easily compare, book, and save on bus and train tickets throughout North America and Europe. Between the apps and the website, Wanderu has millions of active users.

After conducting some user tests on Wanderu’s main search flow we started to realize participants were having difficulty navigating backwards on our site. For a site where users are comparing trips it’s not uncommon to bounce around in the funnel, so being able to navigate backwards is crucial. From a design perspective this was an interesting problem, considering the browser has a built-in back button. So what specifically is the source of difficulty for the users?

Our hypothesis was that as more people are becoming used to a mobile first world and more people are using apps, users are now used to the app convention of always having a back button in the top left of the topbar. By improving the way users navigate up and down our funnel we would see a conversion rate increase.

Here is an example of our old flow. On checkout there was no way in the Wanderu UI to go back. On trip summary users had to tap the word “Change” to go back to the search results page, and in order to go back to the homepage users would have to tap the edit icon.

Truthfully, there wasn’t much need for exploration here. There was no point in reinventing the wheel. We needed to follow best practices and add a topbar with navigation. Users needed a reference point of where they are in the funnel and a way to go back. Below is an example of the new flow.

We designed a topbar component with navigation, added it to all the screens, and built out a Figma prototype from the homepage to checkout.

First we ran some new tests on usertesting.com and it was clear users were no longer struggling. Based on the results of our usability tests, we opted to run a split test on the live site. We tested the new variant on 20% percent of our traffic and reserved another 20% of traffic as a control group. Not only was our hypothesis correct but the results exceeded our expectations. The conversion on the new variant was 10% higher than the control. This was way more of an impact than we thought. We thought we were making a much needed UX improvement and maybe we would see a small improvement, but we were pleasantly surprised.

Best practices and common web conventions exist for a reason, straying from these often leads to user friction and causes users to bounce. Sometimes the solution is really simple and right under your nose.