Discovery and Intuitive Wayfinding on the Road
Building core app features and a design system end-to-end at a travel + tourism startup.
DURATION
Jan 2024 - present
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
LOCATION
Mountain View, CA
TOOLS
Figma, Sketch, Jira, Confluence
Due to my NDA, all visuals, product-specific details, and company name are omitted!
CONTEXT + CONSTRAINTS
I'm currently at an early-stage startup building AI solutions in the travel and tourism space.
We’re designing a platform that helps travelers plan, personalize, and adjust trips, from the first spark of inspiration to navigating experiences in real time. I joined early, when the team was small, fast-moving, and mostly business-focused. At the time, there were no formal UX or product processes in place, which meant I had the opportunity to shape how design fit into our long-term strategy and decision-making.
The goal was building thoughtful, scalable design structure in a space that was still in flux: balancing the founders’ big-picture vision with what was feasible, meaningful, and intuitive for travelers.
MY WORK
I'm leading design for both mobile and desktop experiences.
I owned the mobile companion app and major portions of the desktop planning flow, including onboarding, itinerary editing, and post-booking adjustments. Much of the design process involved translating abstract ideas (“a fun, map-based onboarding,” “an immersive trip editor”) into tangible flows users could understand.
I also helped establish small but foundational UX habits: keeping a shared design file structure, documenting decisions, and building reusable components.
CHALLENGES
Learning to designing within ambiguity and shifting priorities has been a big part of the process.
With no dedicated UX process in place, I often had to read between the lines, decoding verbal brainstorms and transforming them into structured prototypes. Stakeholder opinions shift frequently at early-stage startups, so I learned to advocate for focus: identifying what is core to the user experience versus what was visual noise.
This has meant learning how to communicate design rationale clearly and tactfully, and how to maintain momentum when direction changed week to week. Communication has become just as important as design. Every day is an exercise in finding ways to make complex decisions feel grounded and visible.
TLDR;
Shaping processes, structure, and clarity through design. Yay!
The onboarding flow I designed helped simplify how users express their travel interests and discover personalized trips, turning a sprawling concept into a guided, map-centered experience. The redesigned trip editor introduced a more visual and conversational way to tweak itineraries, setting the foundation for the team’s next product phase.
More personally, this project sharpened my product sense: how to prioritize what truly matters for users, how to advocate for design in ambiguous environments, and how to create structure where there is none.