Tixox

The primary user was American. No lived experience of American travel habits, UX expectations, linguistic tone, or cultural context — and no mature AI tools available.

You can research your way into a culture you've never lived in, if you treat it like a design problem rather than an assumption.

Built research from scratch — visiting sites, reading personal stories, speaking to US-based contacts. Translated every finding into feature decisions, UX writing tone, and flow logic calibrated for a local American audience.

No UI review, no flow review, no UX writing check, no developer to validate feasibility.

When you're the only person checking your own work, your process has to be more disciplined, not less.

Listed every task, broke every phase, made every decision, checked own work across website, user panel, admin panel, and super admin — covering two complete booking systems (flights + hotels) each with own search logic, result pages, detail pages, and checkout flows.

US carriers offer diversity and accessibility options that don't exist in the markets I'd designed for before.

Accessibility features are a first-class design concern, not an edge case to plan for later.

Researched, understood, and documented these as a complete feature set — with no precedent in prior experience and no teammate to sanity-check against.

Had to make strategic decisions alone — identifying what competitors were missing and which gaps were worth filling.

Without a business team, you become the business team. Product design and product strategy are the same job.

Identified competitor gaps through research, chose which unique services would justify a new entrant in a crowded market, and designed the product around those differentiated moments.