Case Study
Entry Points
PickPath had two competing pressures. The business wanted app installs and account creation; their clients — the organizations hosting the tours — didn't want visitors blocked by a sign-up wall before they could listen to a short audio clip in a museum.
I mapped every way a visitor could arrive at a tour — scanning a QR code, following a link, finding the app organically — and designed a progressive onboarding flow where account creation is encouraged but never blocking. Users can continue as a guest, continue in a browser, or install the app and sign in, and each path is treated as a first-class experience rather than a fallback. The friction sits where it should: PickPath still captures the users willing to opt in, and clients get a path that respects their visitors' time, while leading directly into experiences that are branded and within their organizations control.
System Architecture
The harder problem was structural. Clients wanted their tours to feel like a standalone branded app, but PickPath also needed users to discover other tours in the ecosystem. I designed a two-layer navigation model: a base PickPath app with tab navigation, and a per-client sub-application that slides up over the base with its own top navigation, hamburger menu, and branding. A deep link from a museum QR code opens directly into that museums sub-application, so a visitor can complete an audio tour without ever seeing the PickPath interface — but they can always exit back to the main app through an explicit menu action.
The slide-up transition does real work here: it communicates that you're entering a contained space and gives the exit a clear mental model.
Alongside it, I built a block-based customization system for team pages, letting clients reorder sections and apply their own branding within defined slots — which kept the core experience consistent across the platform while giving each client room to make the space feel like theirs.
