App DevelopmentUXUI

TheULTIMATEbookingappforBudapest.

A visually stunning travel companion for tourists exploring Hungary’s capital — integrated seamlessly with a headless CMS.

ServicesUX Design · React Native
PlatformsiOS · Android
Year2024
Ultimate Budapest app on iPhone
travel app for Budapest programs
bookable experiences in the app
platforms — iOS & Android
Design the UX. Build the frontend. Ship clean integration with a live CMS. Zero duplicate content management.

Ultimate Budapest is one of the leading providers of tourist programs in the Hungarian capital — boat tours, ruin bar crawls, cooking classes, thermal bath packages. They had a strong website, a loyal audience, and a clear gap: no mobile app.

They came to us to fix that.

Project Scope

  • Discovery Workshop
  • UX Research & Card Sorting
  • UI Design System
  • Clickable Prototype
  • React Native Development
  • Headless CMS Integration
  • App Store · Google Play Launch

Destination UX

Tourists are not power users. They open an app once, in a new city, possibly jet-lagged, with no patience for complexity.

The challenge was to rethink every interaction for that context: first-time discovery, zero learning curve, instant booking confidence.

Challenge 01

Mobile-first rethinking

The website's information architecture didn't translate directly to mobile. We had to redesign the user journey from scratch for a thumb-driven, screen-size-constrained environment.

Challenge 02

Headless CMS integration

The client's content team manages everything through a headless CMS. The app had to consume the same content endpoints as the website — no duplicate content management, no sync issues.

Challenge 03

Tourist-grade UX

Users are in a foreign city with limited time. Every tap needed to be purposeful. Browse → discover → book had to feel effortless, not like navigating a database.

Ultimate Budapest app screen

How we built it.

01

Workshop & Prioritization

We started with an extensive workshop to map every possible feature the app could have. Using an effort-impact matrix, we scored and ranked them — separating the must-haves from the nice-to-haves before a single line of code was written.

Card sorting helped us organize features into intuitive categories that matched how tourists actually think: not by product type, but by experience type.

Workshop and prioritization session

02

Clickable Prototype

Before development began, we built a fully clickable prototype covering the entire user flow — from landing on the home screen to completing a booking. This let us validate interactions with real users and catch UX issues before they became technical debt.

Clickable prototype screens

03

Frontend Development

With the UX validated, we built the frontend in React Native, ensuring pixel-perfect alignment with the visual designs on both iOS and Android. The tightest constraint: every content element — tour names, descriptions, pricing, imagery — had to come live from the headless CMS, with no hardcoded content anywhere in the app.

React NativeExpress.jsHeadless CMS

By Cubicfox

This is what thoughtful product engineering looks like.

We don’t hand off design files and disappear. We embed into your product, design with real constraints in mind, and ship code that lasts. Ultimate Budapest is one of dozens of products we’ve taken from first workshop to app store.

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A city in your pocket.

Seamless discovery

Tourists browse, filter, and discover programs exactly the way they think — by experience type, not product category.

Instant booking

The full booking flow lives inside the app — no redirects to the website, no broken experience.

One CMS, two platforms

The content team manages everything once — the same entry powers both website and app automatically.

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