Case Study
Improving navigation, filtering, and campground discovery for outdoor travelers through a more intuitive and user-controlled search experience.
Planning outdoor travel should feel exciting, not overwhelming. During usability testing of Recreation.gov, users experienced significant friction when trying to search for and compare campgrounds.
The platform offered multiple competing navigation paths, inconsistent search behaviors, and unclear terminology that increased cognitive load at nearly every step of the booking flow. Users struggled to maintain context while navigating between results and campground pages, and first-time visitors found the system difficult to interpret without prior camping knowledge.
These issues created three primary UX challenges: too many ways to begin a search (leading to decision paralysis), poor navigation feedback and wayfinding (causing users to lose context), and confusing information architecture (requiring users to interpret unfamiliar terms and filters).
From a business perspective, these issues risked increasing abandonment during the discovery and reservation process. Since campground booking is a high-consideration activity involving dates, amenities, and location comparisons, the interface should reduce complexity—not add to it.
The redesign focused on consolidating navigation into a single, predictable search experience, preserving user context through breadcrumbs and persistent search states, simplifying filters and terminology using recognizable language and tooltips, and improving campground comparison through a more integrated search results layout.
The proposed experience reduces cognitive load while helping users confidently browse, compare, and reserve outdoor destinations.
The redesign aimed to improve both user confidence and search efficiency by reducing decision fatigue during search initiation, improving wayfinding and navigation control, supporting faster comparison between campgrounds, increasing clarity for beginner and experienced users alike, and creating a more scalable and accessible search framework.
By aligning the experience with established usability heuristics and behavioral psychology principles, the redesign transforms Recreation.gov from a system users must “figure out” into one that feels familiar and easy to navigate.
To better understand the experience, contextual inquiry sessions were conducted with two participants familiar with Recreation.gov: a relatively new user who had used the platform twice, and an experienced user who had used the site over several years.
Remote usability sessions were facilitated where users were asked to start from the homepage, search for nearby campgrounds, select reservation dates, and add an available campsite to their cart. Throughout the session, users narrated their thought process while identifying moments of confusion or friction.
Users encountered multiple search bars, overlapping navigation systems, and inconsistent search behaviors. Even experienced users reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of starting points available. This violated Hick’s Law by increasing decision fatigue, and Jakob’s Law through unfamiliar navigation patterns.
The experience was consolidated into a single primary search flow supported by one prominent search bar, simplified desktop navigation, icon-based category navigation paired with text labels, and removal of the desktop hamburger menu. This reduces cognitive load at the most important stage: beginning a search.
Clicking campground results opened new tabs and removed users from the search experience. Returning to the homepage reset search progress, and there were no breadcrumbs to help users navigate backward. This violated Nielsen’s heuristics for User Control & Freedom and Visibility of System Status.
The results flow was redesigned to preserve user context by maintaining search state across navigation, introducing persistent breadcrumbs, adding Save Search functionality, and expanding campground details directly within the results list rather than opening a separate page. A split-view structure was also recommended combining persistent map visibility, inline expandable result cards, and map/list synchronization.
Important visual aids like map legends were hidden, and user expected categories like “Backpacking” were missing. This violated Nielsen’s heuristic of Recognition Over Recall.
The filtering experience was redesigned to better align with user mental models by adding tooltip explanations for filters and booking types, expanding categories using recognizable terminology, making map legends visible by default, and linking numbered search results directly to map pins. Users no longer need prior knowledge to understand the system.
The project deliverables included contextual inquiry and usability testing, heuristic evaluation, UX strategy and interaction redesign, low-fidelity wireframes, search results architecture exploration, interactive prototype development, and high-fidelity UI concepts.
The redesign establishes a more cohesive and user-centered booking experience by reducing cognitive overload, supporting exploratory browsing behaviors, improving navigation clarity and orientation, enabling easier comparison between campground options, and creating a stronger foundation for scalable search functionality.
Most importantly, the experience now better reflects users’ mental models and expectations, helping both first-time and experienced visitors navigate the platform with greater confidence.
This project reinforced how quickly cognitive overload can emerge when navigation systems evolve without a unified structure. In a complex domain like travel and reservations, even small inconsistencies in search behavior or terminology can significantly impact usability.
By grounding decisions in usability heuristics, contextual inquiry, and user needs, the friction points identified extended beyond aesthetics and into how users mentally process information and make decisions.
Working on this project also concreted the importance of receiving feedback ealry and often, as several changes were made to enhance usability after stakeholder review.
Moving forward, this work would be expanded through additional moderated usability testing, accessibility validation, mobile-specific interaction patterns, and quantitative measurement of search completion and task success rates.
