Designing a social travel platform from zero to launch
Company
Blubeez
Role
Sole Designer
Industry
Travel
Scope
Web App
SUMMARY
Blubeez was designed as a social travel platform that brings together destination discovery, community interaction, trip planning, and experience sharing in one product. I joined as the sole designer and took the platform from early concept to a launch-ready web application.
The core challenge was to design a product that felt inspiring like a travel platform, useful like a planning tool, and social enough to keep people engaged beyond a single trip.
The problem
Most travel products solve only one part of the journey well.
Some are strong at bookings. Others are good for inspiration. A few support reviews or community. But for most travelers, planning still means switching between multiple apps to research places, validate recommendations, organize ideas, and share the experience later.
That fragmentation creates a broken journey:
Discovery happens in one place,
Trust-building happens somewhere else,
Trip planning happens manually,
Sharing becomes an afterthought.
Blubeez was an opportunity to bring those disconnected behaviors into one cohesive platform.
The opportunity
The product vision was not to create another booking tool or another social feed.
The opportunity was to design a travel product that could support four connected needs in one system:
Discover destinations and attractions,
Connect with fellow travelers,
Plan and save trip ideas,
Share experiences in a meaningful way.
The challenge was making that breadth feel simple, not overloaded.
MY ROLE
I was the sole UX/UI designer on the project, working directly with the co-founder throughout the product design process.
I owned the end-to-end design across:
research synthesis,
information architecture,
wireframing,
visual design,
prototyping,
and developer handoff.
My approach
I started by understanding the gap in the market and the product shape Blubeez needed to take.
Understand the landscape
I studied existing travel and community platforms to identify where the experience was still fragmented. The goal was to understand how users currently moved across inspiration, planning, trust, and sharing—and where those journeys broke down.
Define the product structure
I worked with the founder to shape the platform around four core pillars:
Discover
Connect
Plan
Share
This became the foundation for the information architecture and helped keep the product focused as features expanded.
Design the core flows first
I explored early ideas through fast wireframing, focusing on the most important user journeys: onboarding, destination browsing, planning, and the social feed. This helped us align quickly on structure before moving into polished UI.
Build a system that could scale
Once the flow direction was clear, I designed the high-fidelity product in Figma using a reusable component system. The interface needed to feel visually rich enough for travel content, while staying structured enough to support planning and community behavior.
The solution
I designed Blubeez as a unified travel experience built around four connected product layers:
Destination discovery
Users could explore places through curated content, destination-focused browsing, and traveler-driven context.
Community and connection
The platform supported traveler profiles and social interaction to make recommendations feel more human and experience-based.
Trip planning
Users could save places, organize ideas, and move from inspiration into action without leaving the platform.
Experience sharing
Instead of treating sharing as a post-trip feature, the product made it part of the core experience through a visual, social feed.
The result was a product that balanced aspiration and utility—something between a travel guide, a planning tool, and a niche social network.
Information Architecture
Initial sketches
Key design decisions
One platform, multiple travel behaviors
The biggest design challenge was not adding features. It was making discovery, planning, community, and sharing feel like one product instead of four separate modules.
Card-based content system
I used a card-based approach across destinations, stories, profiles, and saved items. This gave the product a modular structure and made content easier to scan, reuse, and scale across different screens.
Visual but restrained
Travel products can easily become noisy because imagery, maps, reviews, and social content all compete for attention. I chose a cleaner layout system with strong hierarchy and breathing room so the interface stayed useful, not overwhelming.
Social as a core behavior
A key product decision was to treat the social layer as central to the platform rather than secondary. That made Blubeez feel more alive and differentiated from tools that only focus on search or planning.
Final UI screens
Outcome
The final designs were delivered as a complete, launch-ready web application and implemented for release.
More importantly, the project helped define how a travel platform could move beyond isolated utilities and become a more connected user experience—from inspiration to planning to sharing.
As the sole designer on the project, it also strengthened my ability to work end-to-end, make decisions quickly, and bring structure to a broad product vision without losing usability.