WildCAT Hobby Classes — UI/UX case study.
A site for hands-on trade classes — welding, metal-smithing, blacksmithing and electrical — aimed at people who want to learn a physical skill from scratch.
- Client
- WildCAT Hobby Classes
- Role
- UI/UX and visual design
- Sector
- Education — vocational / hobby
- Surface
- Marketing site, class listings, booking
Context
WildCAT teaches trades as hobbies: welding, metal-smithing, blacksmithing, electrical. The audience is beginners, and the main barrier is not price — it is the worry that they will turn up and be out of their depth.
So the site’s real job is reassurance as much as merchandising: what happens in a class, what you need to bring, and whether it is genuinely for someone who has never held a torch.
What the design had to do
Lower the intimidation
Beginners self-select out. Show the room, the kit and the first hour.
Make classes comparable
Discipline, level, duration and date, scannable side by side.
Get to a booking
Pick a class, pick a date, pay — short enough to finish on a phone.
Replace this with the brief in WildCAT Hobby Classes’s own words, plus the one constraint that shaped the most decisions — timeline, tech, compliance, an existing design system, or a stakeholder. This is the part a hiring manager reads first.
Process
Unusually for a booking site, the blocker here is emotional rather than functional. The steps below are mostly about removing a reason not to come.
Understand
Beginners learning welding and blacksmithing. The barrier isn’t price — it’s turning up and feeling out of place.
Research
Find what a first-timer actually wants to know: what to wear, what’s provided, and whether anyone else in the room will be a beginner too.
Wireframe
Put the class facts — discipline, level, duration, date, price — in the same position every time, so a list can be scanned rather than read.
Visual design
Show the workshop, the kit and the sparks. The real environment does reassurance that copy can’t.
Prototype
Book a class start to finish on a phone, because that is where the decision gets made.
Handoff & support
A class-listing pattern the team can extend every term without design involvement.
The steps above describe what each stage had to solve on WildCAT Hobby Classes. What turns that into a case study is the evidence — add, for any two or three of them:
- Who you spoke to, and the one finding that changed the design
- A decision you made, and the option you rejected
- Something that tested badly, and what you did about it
- A wireframe or screen — before and after beats a finished shot
Outcome
Class businesses live or die on fill rate, and the honest test is whether nervous beginners actually book.
Class fill rate, by discipline
Booking completion — how many who start finish
Share of first-time vs. returning students
Enquiries asking “is this suitable for beginners?” — this should fall if the page works
Put real figures against the four above, or strike the ones you can’t evidence. If WildCAT Hobby Classes never shared numbers, a single sentence from the client about what changed is still worth more than a blank. Right now no project on the site states an outcome, and that is the biggest gap in the portfolio.
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