Bushtracks Expeditions
2 Projects
From a fragmented digital presence to an end-to-end luxury travel experience
Client Project
Visual Design
Visual Designer
Website Redesign • Progressive App
Dec 2018 - Mar 2019
A luxury brand under-served by its digital presence
Bushtracks Expeditions is a premium African safari outfitter with a reputation built on deeply personalized, curated travel experiences. Their trips are thoughtfully tailored to each client - intimate, expert-guided, and unforgettable. But their digital presence told a completely different story.
The existing website was difficult to navigate, visually outdated, and failed to communicate the essence of the brand. Visitors couldn't easily find trip details or booking options, and the experience felt generic - a significant liability for a company whose entire value proposition rests on exclusivity and trust. Leads were dropping off, bookings were stalling, and the digital gap between Bushtracks and its premium competitors was growing.
Problem
The website was losing bookings before the conversation even started.
Our job was to close that gap - and then build something that extended the relationship far beyond the first click.
The Website
Outdated IA and visual design failed to communicate the brand's premium positioning, creating friction at the top of the conversion funnel.
The Customer Journey
No digital touchpoint existed to support travelers before, during, or after their trip - leaving a significant engagement gap across the full experience lifecycle.
Solution
One engagement, two products.
This engagement evolved across two distinct but interconnected phases. Phase one was foundational: establish a brand language worthy of Bushtracks' reputation and rebuild the website from the ground up. Phase two was expansive: take that same brand and extend it into the hands of travelers with a companion app that supported every stage of their journey.
Together, these projects weren't just design exercises — they were a complete rethinking of how Bushtracks shows up digitally, from the moment someone discovers them to the moment they're home reliving their adventure.
The redesign started with the brand question: what should Bushtracks feel like? Working with my Design Director, we built a visual identity rooted in the African landscape - warm earth tones, refined typography, and an editorial sensibility that matched the premium nature of the product.
From there, we restructured the information architecture to remove friction from the booking journey and redesigned every key page to balance inspiration with clarity. The result was a site that felt as considered and curated as the trips themselves - fully responsive across every device.
Identifying the journey gap. Even after the website redesign, there was a meaningful gap in the customer experience. Once a trip was booked, the relationship between Bushtracks and its clients essentially went dark - until they arrived in Africa. Users had no single place to manage pre-travel tasks, no mobile access to their itinerary during the trip, and no way to revisit or share their experience after returning home.
The progressive web app was designed to fill that gap - becoming a companion that deepened the Bushtracks relationship at every stage of the journey.
Before Trip
Plan & Prepare
Browse and book directly from mobile. Track pre-travel tasks and stay connected with your outfitter throughout the planning process.
During Trip
Experience
Access live itinerary and day-by-day plans. Communicate with the Bushtracks team. Everything you need, at your fingertips in the field.
After Trip
Remember & Return
Revisit past trips and saved memories. Review itineraries and inspire future adventures. The experience lives on long after the flight home.
The most intentional design decision in this engagement wasn't any single screen - it was the decision to treat the website and the app as one connected system rather than two separate deliverables. Every brand decision made in Phase 1 informed Phase 2. The same color tokens, type scale, component patterns, and visual language carried through from the website into the app. This wasn't just aesthetic consistency - it was strategic. When a user moved from the website to the app, the experience felt like a natural continuation, not a handoff to a different product.
Design System
Shared Component Language
Typography, color tokens, card patterns, and interaction principles established for the website were extended into the app - enabling speed, consistency, and coherence across both surfaces.
User Mental Model
One Brand, One Journey
The user's mental model of Bushtracks - premium, curated, trustworthy - needed to be reinforced at every touchpoint. Design continuity across web and mobile was how we achieved that.
The website redesign delivered immediate, measurable improvements to the conversion funnel - and the app extended Bushtracks' relationship with clients from a transactional booking moment to an ongoing, loyalty-building experience.
Increased Booking Conversion Rate
Decreased Bounce Rate on Trip Pages
End-to-End Journey Coverage
Website Impact
Conversion Uplift
The redesigned information architecture and conversion-focused trip pages reduced friction at every stage of the booking funnel. Users could find, explore, and act - without losing their way.
App Impact
Relationship Extension
The app transformed a single booking transaction into an ongoing relationship - giving Bushtracks a meaningful touchpoint before, during, and after every trip. A key driver of repeat business and referrals.
Beyond the metrics, the most significant outcome was the establishment of a coherent design system that Bushtracks could build on. Both the website and app were designed not just to solve immediate problems but to create a foundation - patterns, components, and principles that could scale as the business grew.
This project sharpened two instincts I carry into every engagement now: the value of designing systems rather than screens, and the importance of aligning brand identity with digital experience at the very start of a project - not as an afterthought.
01
Lead with brand, not features
The website redesign only worked because we started with the brand question first. What does Bushtracks stand for? What should a visitor feel? Those answers guided every design decision that followed - and kept us from building a technically functional but emotionally flat experience.
02
Design the ecosystem, not the artifact
Treating the website and app as one connected system - with shared language and design principles - was what made both products feel premium. Designing each in isolation would have produced two decent products. Designing them as a system produced something greater than the sum of its parts.