Discover with purpose
Design Discover as a place to find real experiences, learn from other travelers and immediately turn ideas into trip plans.
Richly Stampd rethinks travel itinerary discovery and planning around real experiences, not generic travel guides. The platform makes authentic trips discoverable, actionable and easier to plan. I owned the product direction and experience end to end, from research and interaction design through prototyping, testing and shipping a full-stack product, collaborating with backend engineers along the way.
The Challenge
Trip planning was fragmented across social media, maps, notes and spreadsheets. Extensive market research and user interviews revealed that highly intentional planners (especially Type A travelers) weren't struggling to find inspiration; they were struggling to turn it into a cohesive plan they could confidently act on.
The market lacked a single product that supported the full planning workflow while making it easy to share trip plans and real travel experiences with family and friends. As a result, travelers spent hours manually collecting, organizing and transferring information between disconnected tools.
Insight
Through user interviews, follow-up sessions and extensive market research, a few consistent behaviors emerged. The opportunity wasn't simply to help travelers find more places, it was to make the transition from inspiration to planning feel more organized, visual and shareable.
Discovery wasn't the gap. Planning was.
Travelers had plenty of inspiration; the friction was turning saves into an organized, actionable trip.
Context mattered.
Travelers wanted to see itineraries by day, location and event type, not only a static list view.
Planning was social.
Travelers wanted itineraries that felt personal and polished enough to share with friends and family.
Design & Validation
The research pointed to a broader product challenge: travel discovery, planning and sharing were treated as separate experiences. The design direction was to connect these moments into one cohesive system, making discovery actionable, planning intuitive and itineraries worth sharing.
Design Discover as a place to find real experiences, learn from other travelers and immediately turn ideas into trip plans.
Create a planning experience that lets travelers organize by day, location and event type while understanding the trip spatially on a map.
Design itineraries to feel personal, visual and polished enough to share, turning a functional travel plan into an experience people are proud to show others.
I explored early concepts and information architecture to define how travelers could discover and engage with real itineraries, then validated those directions through user feedback. Insights around faster scanning and more playful budget discovery shaped a dynamic, data-driven Discover experience powered by real itinerary data.
“I love the idea of seeing actual itineraries from real people, instead of just influencer travel guides. I could definitely see myself using this when I'm starting to plan a trip.”
Maya Chen
Traveler · Type A planner
User feedback reshaped the itinerary experience. Testing showed that more information wasn't necessarily more useful, the experience needed to be quick to scan, easy to navigate, digestible at a glance and fun to explore.
“Planning by day and seeing everything on a map changed how I build trips. I could tell what fit together without bouncing between five apps.”
Jordan Blake
Traveler · Weekend explorer
Sharing the highlights of a trip feels effortless; sharing the detailed plans behind them is another story. I designed a unified itinerary experience that replaces fragmented planning across notes, spreadsheets and group chats with one structured, shareable space, making trip details easier to organize and effortless to share.
Designed sharing at both the itinerary and profile level, giving users the flexibility to share a specific travel experience or their broader collection of trips and destinations.
“The itinerary looked polished enough to send to my friends. It felt like a real trip plan, not a messy notes dump.”
Priya Nair
Traveler · Group trip organizer
Product Management
I stepped beyond product design to help drive Richly Stampd from concept toward MVP, partnering closely with two backend engineers to translate product priorities into an actionable development roadmap. I broke larger product goals into engineering tasks, aligned weekly priorities and continuously adjusted scope based on dependencies, feedback and MVP needs.
I also helped establish a consistent delivery rhythm across design and engineering, coordinating code changes, reviewing progress, unblocking work and pushing releases toward production. This gave me end-to-end visibility into the product lifecycle and strengthened my ability to balance user needs, technical constraints and business priorities while keeping the team moving toward a shared outcome.
Takeaways
Richly Stampd looks fundamentally different from where we started in June 2025, and that evolution was intentional. Continuous user testing challenged our early assumptions, helping us distinguish between what we thought travelers needed and what they actually responded to. Each round of feedback shaped the next iteration, turning an early concept into the more focused, intuitive and thoughtfully crafted experience it is today.
Richly Stampd is currently in pilot, with the next phase focused on refining the experience and preparing for iOS and Android launches. The goal is to build the systems that enable travelers to create, discover, save, share and personalize real itineraries at scale, turning individual travel experiences into reusable knowledge for the community.
Richly Stampd is live and in pilot. Explore the platform, browse real itineraries, and see how discovery, planning and sharing come together in one experience.
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