Explore Now was conceived as a response to a gap I noticed long before “community-led travel platforms” became a category of their own.

At the time, travel discovery was dominated by generic lists, influencer hype, or algorithmic recommendations still very detached from lived experience. What was missing was a product built around trust, behaviour, and first-hand insight, a way to discover places through people who had actually been there, stayed there, and could recommend them with credibility.

I approached Explore Now as a minimum viable product (MVP), not to solve travel broadly, but to validate a simple question: Would people trust and engage with travel recommendations more if they came from a community of like-minded travellers rather than faceless rankings?

From the outset, this was a behavioural design problem, not a demographic one.

Rather than segmenting users by age or location, I focused on how people travel, why they make decisions, and what they outsource versus control themselves. Through personas, empathy maps, and journey mapping, clear behavioural patterns emerged.

Some travellers sought self-indulgent experiences that blended luxury with growth or self-improvement. Others valued simplicity and reassurance, preferring to lean on trusted voices rather than invest time in deep research. These nuances reshaped how “adventure” needed to be defined, not as a category, but as a personal interpretation.

Explore Now wasn’t about suggesting where to go. It was about helping people feel confident in why a place was right for them.

Research was deliberately scrappy and human. I combined lightweight quantitative surveys with in-person interviews, sourcing participants through social platforms, personal networks, and spontaneous conversations, often over coffee. These sessions revealed not just preferences, but hesitation, fear, and trust signals that rarely surface in analytics alone.

Key insights shaped the product direction:

• Trust and safety outweighed novelty

• Reviews and photos mattered more than curated copy

• Personal stories created emotional pull far stronger than marketing language

• Traditional travel categories were too shallow to support real decision-making

This research became the backbone of the MVP.

Using prioritised user stories, I translated insight into clear product structure. Sitemaps and early wireframes focused on:

• Fast comprehension

• Low cognitive load

• Clear signals of credibility

• Minimal barriers to exploration

I designed the experience to feel inviting and above all, trustworthy, rather than overwhelming or sales-driven. The goal wasn’t feature depth. It was clarity.

Explore Now relied on trust as its primary currency.

The interface prioritised:

• Transparency over persuasion

• Minimalism over noise

• Ease of use over cleverness

• Storytelling over slogans

Language played a key role. Action-oriented verbs like explore, discover, belong, share consistently resonated during testing across the various user groups. These weren’t marketing choices, they were behavioural cues, encouraging participation rather than passive consumption.

Community stories and recommendations weren’t add-ons. They were the product.

Conversion optimisation was embedded from the start, not layered on later.

I treated sign-up, exploration, and contribution as part of a single behavioural journey. Through observation, early A/B testing, and usability sessions, I identified friction around trust signals, first-time understanding, and perceived effort.

Small changes to flow, language, and hierarchy had outsized impact, reinforcing a key lesson: Good design doesn’t push users forward. It removes the reasons they hesitate.

I design from behaviour first, not simply a set of features. I focus on how people think, hesitate, and decide, then shape structure and flows around real use, not assumptions.

I take end-to-end ownership, from discovery and positioning through UX, testing, optimisation, and launch. I’m comfortable in ambiguity, making clear trade-offs and moving ideas forward without waiting for perfect inputs.

I prioritise clarity over complexity, designing calm, intuitive experiences even when systems are complex. I work iteratively, testing early, learning fast, and refining based on real behaviour.

For me, good design helps people move forward with confidence and helps products perform better over time.