Peter Pan Redesign
This case study tackles the accessibility challenges of the Peter Pan Bus website—an essential travel tool for students, tourists, and commuters across the Northeast. By focusing on non-native speakers and users with cognitive disabilities, the redesign addresses language barriers, dense information layouts, and complex navigation. The goal: a clearer, more intuitive, and more inclusive booking experience for everyone.
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Tools
Figma, Figjam
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Role
UX Designer & Researcher
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Timeline
September 2025 - December 2025
Goal
This project aims to create a more accessible and intuitive travel-planning experience for Peter Pan Bus users. By simplifying navigation, reducing cognitive load, and supporting language accessibility, the redesign helps non-native speakers and users with cognitive disabilities find essential information with ease—transforming a confusing booking process into a clear, inclusive, and confidence-building journey.
Problem
Public transportation websites should make travel planning simple, but the current Peter Pan Bus site overwhelms users with dense information, complex menus, and no translation support. These barriers disproportionately affect non-native speakers and people with cognitive disabilities, turning a basic task—finding schedules, routes, or booking a ticket—into a confusing and frustrating experience. As a result, many users struggle to navigate the site or abandon the process altogether.
Design Process
Empathize
User Research
We conducted 6 usability interviews with non-native speakers and users with cognitive disabilities.
Participants completed 5 key tasks on the Peter Pan website using a think-aloud approach.
We collected feedback on confusion or frustration points, cognitive load and task difficulty, Navigation, language clarity, and information density
Supplementary Research
We reviewed academic literature on cognitive accessibility and multilingual users.
Key takeaways:
Simplify language and instructions
Use scannable layouts and clear visual cues
Provide translation and accessibility support
Define
Ideate
Information Architecture
We mapped the entire Peter Pan website, uncovering overlapping buttons, redundant content, and confusing navigation paths. This process guided the creation of a clearer, more organized site structure.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Wireframes for key pages tested simplified layouts, intuitive flows, and reduced cognitive load, turning our research insights into actionable design solutions.
Prototype
In the Prototype phase, we redesigned the Peter Pan website and created a unified design system to keep everything consistent. We made a clearer hierarchy so key travel tasks were easier to find, simplified navigation, used more intuitive language, standardized buttons with better contrast, turned images with overlapping text into card layouts, and added breadcrumb navigation to improve wayfinding—all while keeping the brand’s vintage look.
Check out our key changes…
Conclusion & Final Thoughts
Key Takeaways
I came out of this project with three main takeaways:
Real users are essential.
What we think people need often differs from what they actually struggle with. Speaking directly to users revealed issues we would not have identified on our own.A larger participant pool strengthens insights.
More diverse perspectives would help validate patterns, challenge assumptions, and uncover needs we might otherwise overlook.Inclusive design must be built in, not added on.
Approaching this project through an inclusive design lens pushed us beyond standard HCI or usability work. It reinforced that accessibility isn’t optional or “extra.” “Inclusive design is not extra work; it’s part of the work.”
If we had more time…
Our next steps would include:
Conducting usability tests and iterating on the prototype based on real feedback.
Running an inclusive heuristic evaluation using Universal Design principles and WCAG cognitive guidelines.
Testing with a larger and more diverse user group to deepen and validate our insights.