Proving a Design Decision Moved Revenue
It shipped. Nobody checked if it worked.
This luxury travel platform's booking flow includes a moment of friction: a traveler's preferred tour date isn't available in their preferred format. Rather than losing that booking outright, the platform surfaces the closest alternative where availability exists: a design decision meant to keep the traveler in the funnel instead of bouncing to a competitor.
The feature shipped, worked as intended, and moved into the normal cadence of new work. It had been live for a while, but nobody had gone back to actually measure what it was doing once it met real travelers making real decisions.
Closing the loop during cooldown.
During a cooldown period between projects, I went back to close that loop. A click on the alternative-date link converted at a rate far above the site's baseline, a strong enough signal on its own to justify pulling the order data and tracing those visits through to what people actually booked.
The interesting part wasn't just that people booked. A majority of them could have chosen the pricier option instead and booked immediately, but chose to wait for the date the feature surfaced anyway. That's a direct signal the feature was doing its job: giving people a real alternative instead of losing them at a dead end.
"I'm big on capturing engineering proximity and real outcomes in my documentation. This was a clear case where I had the access and the reason to check."
This reflects a real, measured outcome. Specific figures are withheld here to protect business-sensitive data.
Most work gets judged on how it looks. This is judged on what it did.
Most of my work gets evaluated on whether it looks better or tests well. This is one of the few times I can point to a specific interaction pattern and trace it straight to revenue. No attribution modeling required, no assumptions about causation.
It's also proof that I don't consider a feature done just because it shipped. Going back to check whether something actually worked is part of the job, not extra credit.
"I found out a feature we'd shipped had actually recovered meaningful revenue that nobody had gone back to measure. So I did."
Michaela Hoffman, Principal UX/UI Designer