Also second semester, year one. Travel Match was a different challenge from Bug's Life because the entire experience had to be designed for a tablet. Not something you naturally think about when you spend most of your time designing for desktop or phone.

The concept: a fun travel matching app that would sit in a travel agency for customers to use while they waited or browsed. The interface had to feel intuitive, a bit playful, and something people would actually want to interact with, not just tolerate.

I remember struggling with it at the start. The tablet format felt off: the proportions weren't what I was used to and it was hard to think concretely about how someone's hands would move across it. How far do you reach, what feels natural at that size, how do you make something feel designed for the device rather than just stretched. Some good feedback from the design teachers helped me push through that block and actually get somewhere.

What I learned

Designing for a specific physical context is different from designing a UI in the abstract. When you know the device, the setting, and roughly who's using it (a travel agency customer, probably relaxed, not particularly invested in the task), those constraints shape a lot of decisions. This was the project where I started to understand what experience design actually means beyond just "making things look nice."