Role
UX researcher (solo)
Timeline
2020-2021
Tools
Adobe XD, Miro, Zoom
Problem / Context
Nina Trvl is a startup travel company that wanted to build a more personalized booking experience, one based on a traveler's actual interests rather than a generic package. I led the research to define who we were designing for, then carried that research into the UI with a small team, building out the homepage, discovery flow, profile, and landmark pages, and the full booking flow from flight selection through checkout.
Process
I started with 35 in-person interviews and a set of surveys, then read existing research on booking behavior to round out the picture. Alongside that, I audited 12 competitor sites and apps, from aggregators like Kayak and Google Flights to niche tools like Maps.me and TripIt, to see what already existed and where the real gaps were.
35
Interviews
12
Apps audited
4
Generations covered
What we learned
79%
book on desktop
Desktop wins trust for the actual booking.
Even travelers who research on mobile move to a laptop to book. Interviewees called desktop "safer" and easier for comparing tabs.
90%
swayed by reviews
Reviews decide more than price does.
More than brand or cost. Travelers told us a listing with no reviews was often a dealbreaker on its own.
66%
millennials, mobile
Younger travelers are mobile first and interest first.
Millennials do the majority of trip work on mobile and lean on TikTok and Instagram for ideas, not generic packages.
"
"I start on my phone but I always switch to my laptop when I actually want to look at something."
Interview participant; older millennial, family traveler
Grounding the design in three real peoplE
Research findings are easy to design around in the abstract and easy to lose sight of once you're deep in screens. To keep that from happening, I built personas based directly on the interview data, covering the three traveler types that kept showing up across generations.
Barbara, 64, a retired baby boomer.
- Travels every few months with her husband - Wants fully prepaid, all-inclusive bookings - Trusts desktop over mobile, avoids heavy filters
Nick, 30, a millennial consultant.
- Extends business trips into leisure time. - Researches on mobile, books on desktop. - Relies on price alerts over hunting for deals.
Maya, 24, a Gen Z student
- Discovers trips through TikTok and Instagram - Wants authentic, local experiences - Watches every fee on a tight budget
What it means
The research pointed to a spectrum, not a simple split. Barbara wanted ease and predictability: book once, prepay, and be done. Maya wanted the opposite: a slower, more exploratory process built around her own interests, with room to discover things along the way. Nick sat in between the two, wanting speed and price alerts like Maya, but still trusting desktop for the actual purchase like Barbara. Designing one generic flow for all three would likely satisfy none of them.
That spectrum shaped the first real UI decision: build a homepage anchored by a search bar, with an optional discovery quiz (what are you looking for in a trip) that travelers could take anytime, so the product could route each type of traveler toward the experience they actually wanted, rather than forcing everyone down the same path.
Validating the visual direction
Findings and personas guide structure, but they do not tell you what a button should look like. Once I had UI directions in progress, I ran a follow-up survey asking real users to rank different visual treatments of the top navigation for aesthetic preference alone, keeping the copy identical across versions so the response was about visual design, not content.
That feedback directly shaped the final navigation and color direction you can see in the delivered UI below: the teal and white palette, the icon-led top navigation, and the simplified search bar.
MVP Recommendations
High Impact
Interest-based destination and hotel matching
Both Gen Z and older travelers want options shaped around what they care about, not just price
High Impact
Itinerary storage that travels from desktop to mobile
Users book on desktop and navigate on mobile, the app needs to bridge that gap natively
High Impact
Reviews integrated throughout, not siloed to a tab
90% of travelers rely on them. They need to show up where decisions get made.
Medium Impact
Built-in trip budgeting
No one uses a separate budgeting app, but almost everyone wishes they had tracked spending better
Medium Impact
Offline content download (maps, tickets, directions)
Mentioned consistently by travelers who've been burned by spotty international data
Low Impact
Social and community features
High appeal for Gen Z; lower priority until core booking experience is solid
What We handed off
From research to persona to validated visual direction, here is the UI we built for Nina Trvl:
Homepage and discovery.
A short "what are you looking for in a trip" quiz sits with the top navigation ("Nina Discover"), routing travelers toward relaxation, adventure, culture, or family trips.
A Profile page
Users could save trips, photos, their discovery results and more in their profile
A full booking flow
Flight selection, a trip review screen, and a secured checkout with a live price summary, built to reduce the hesitation we heard about again and again in interviews: not knowing how much a trip would really cost until the very end.
Final Thoughts
The strongest part of this project was not the research or the UI on their own, it was the line between them. Every major UI decision, the discovery quiz, the navigation direction, the up-front pricing in checkout, traces back to something a real traveler told us in an interview or a survey. That is the version of this work I am proudest of: research that did not just inform design, but visibly became it.