One of the world's top 3 travel players was managing complex multi-country cruise tours in spreadsheets — 30+ constraints per tour, manual data across departments, and no approval pipeline. This was a workflow design problem, not a UI problem.
The client's planning and analysis team was managing thousands of cruise tour itineraries across multiple ship operators, seasons, and ports — entirely in Excel. Data lived in silos across departments. Approvals happened over email. Human error was endemic.
The challenge wasn't building a product — it was understanding an extraordinarily complex planning process well enough to redesign it. That required inception work, not just UX work.
"You were able to achieve one of the main goals: centralize all of the data sources. I think it's a 60% efficiency improvement."
I led an inception process that brought together the full cross-functional team — PM, engineering, design, the CEO, CTO, and analysts — to define the problem before any design began. The inception covered:
The To-Be User Journey was the main alignment tool — revisited three times during the project as new complexity emerged. It became the shared artefact that kept the CEO, CTO, PM, and design team pointed at the same north star.
With a 3-month PoC deadline and an Angular Material design system launching in parallel, speed and process discipline were non-negotiable. I designed a framework aligned to the sprint cadence — giving the client full transparency while keeping the team moving.
Week 1
Research & Alignment
Visual research, brainstorming, One Pager alignment document, tech feasibility check, acceptance criteria definition.
Week 2
Design & PO Feedback
Wireframing through high-fidelity mockups, PO feedback session, client meeting for alignment and expectation management.
Week 3
Prototype & Test
Figma prototype of complex interactions, usability testing with analysts — small set, focused on critical flows.
Week 4
Refine & Ready for Dev
Mockup improvements based on testing, edge case definition, high-fidelity handover with design system component mapping.
The primary user was an expert analyst — spending 8 hours a day in this tool, managing hundreds of tours simultaneously. Every design decision was grounded in four principles: all relevant information accessible for the task at hand, scannable and reduced cognitive load, maximize screen real estate, and allow for safe experimentation.
Interface Architecture
Page / Content / Detail View
A consistent three-panel layout pattern across all journeys — list, selection, and detail — giving analysts high and low-level views without context-switching.
Tour Creation
Drag-and-drop itinerary builder
Designed a spatial, drag-and-drop interface for building day-by-day itineraries — managing port sequences, travel days, and time constraints across complex routes.
Approval Workflow
Defined roles & permissions
Mapped a complete approval pipeline — Analyst → Team Manager → Department Head → Executive — with clear roles, permissions, and notification states at each stage.
Design System
Extended Angular Material
Built a Figma project library extending the company's design system — ensuring consistency across 25+ products and managing requirement changes that affected cross-application components.
"It has been great to work with the application. I was able to do some enhancements to various tours that needed help. It was great!"
— Analyst, post-launch user feedback