PurpleBricks Case Study

Situation:
While working as a Senior Product Designer at Purplebricks, I was involved in improving the online booking journey for property valuations.

We had identified that a significant number of users were dropping off before confirming their booking, especially on mobile devices.

Task:
Our task was to reimagine the booking experience to reduce friction, increase conversions, and make the process more intuitive and accessible across devices.

Action:
To solve this, we applied leading-edge design thinking by:

• Introducing progressive disclosure — showing only the essential fields initially and revealing others based on user input, reducing perceived effort.
• Pushing for real-time validation and inline help so users received instant feedback, a tactic inspired by best-in-class booking platforms.
• Conducting rapid remote user testing using Maze and unmoderated sessions, which was relatively new to our workflow at the time.
• Advocating for mobile-first micro-interactions like smart defaults, auto-suggestions for addresses, and personalized reminders (taking inspiration from travel apps).
• Collaborating closely with developers to optimize load times and remove unnecessary page reloads, improving mobile performance.

One strategy that proved critical was mapping the emotional state of users throughout the booking journey, ensuring design decisions supported user confidence at each step.

Challenges:
One major challenge was balancing business requirements (capturing data for lead generation) with the need to reduce form fields and friction. I facilitated a series of workshops with marketing and sales stakeholders to prioritize user needs first while still capturing the most critical business information.

Result:
The redesigned booking journey led to a 18% increase in completed valuation bookings within the first quarter after launch.

We also saw:

• A 11% decrease in mobile abandonment rates.
• Improved customer satisfaction feedback regarding the booking process.

Success was measured through A/B testing against the previous journey, Google Analytics conversion funnels, and post-booking user surveys.

Additionally, new mobile-first interaction patterns we introduced became the new standard for other customer journeys across Purplebricks.