School Project
2026
Travia: Travel Memory Documenting Platform
Designing and building a responsive travel-memory platform
Overview
This case study highlights a collaborative academic project where I partnered with two other designers to create a responsive digital platform for documenting and organizing travel memories. Our team executed the entire end-to-end UX design lifecycle, from foundational user research and journey mapping to high-fidelity prototyping.
Beyond the design phase, we took the project a step further by fully vibe coding the final product. This allowed us to bridge the gap between design and development, successfully translating our static screens into a dynamic, functional build that scales seamlessly from a desktop web environment to a mobile interface.
Problem
Summary
The process of documenting travel experiences is often fragmented and treated as an afterthought. Travelers currently lack a streamlined, frictionless tool to store memories or trigger reminders to capture moments while they are actively on the go.
My Role
As part of a three-person team, I contributed to the platform's end-to-end creation. My responsibilities spanned from conducting foundational user research and designing responsive, high-fidelity interfaces to utilizing AI-assisted vibe coding to build and deploy the final functional web and mobile application.
Research
Market Research
Through a competitive audit of leading travel apps, we analyzed how current market solutions handle trip management and packing. While existing tools excel at pre-trip logistics, such as automated packing, email parsing, and itinerary mapping, they often fall short during the actual journey due to feature overload, rigid structures, or outdated, text-heavy interfaces. Most importantly, current solutions fail to seamlessly bridge the gap between planning a trip and capturing memories in real-time on the go
User Interviews
To ground our design in real travel behaviors, we conducted user interviews to understand how travelers plan trips, document experiences, and revisit past memories. Two distinct archetypes emerged from our research.
User Models
To synthesize our interview findings into actionable design frameworks, we mapped travel behaviors along two primary axes: Planning Focus vs. Experience Focus and Spontaneous vs. Structured.
By evaluating our primary user personas, the Memory Seeker and the Analytical Spectator, across these spectrums, we identified eight distinct behavioral profiles that helped us pinpoint core user needs and design targets for Travia.
Define
User Story
User Journey Map
To design an end-to-end experience that bridges pre-trip logistics with real-time memory capture, we mapped out a four-stage user journey: Onboarding, Browsing & Inspiration, Trip Planning, and Memory Logging.
This mapping ensured that every feature addresses specific user needs across the entire travel lifecycle, moving from personalized setup to long-term reflection.
User Flow (Desktop to Mobile)
To map out the exact steps a traveler takes from initial inspiration to real-time memory logging, we built a comprehensive user flow. A key focus of this architecture was designing a seamless Desktop-to-Mobile handoff, acknowledging that users prefer larger screens for complex logistical planning, but rely entirely on mobile devices while actively navigating a trip.
Design Process
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Lessons
Final Thoughts
