One part of improving flight bookings was refining the filters and ensuring the most relevant results surfaced first. I adjusted default filter ranges, enabled buttons only when contextually relevant to cut cognitive load, and added support for corporate-specific fares.

I proposed conceptual ideas for how the search algorithms could work to improve the user experience, providing clear guidance on the desired results rather than coding. To refine these proposals, I sat down with the developers and walked through what the APIs could return, typical response times, payload sizes, and how they handled booking conflicts.

Their insights helped me shape ideas that fit within those limits, balancing usability with the constraints of external services and the existing codebase. It was an interesting and fun challenge to think about usability in the context of technical limitations of external systems in combination with the current code base.

The team already had a Hotjar pipeline running, so I dug into the backlog of heatmaps and set up some recordings of my own. I pulled the highlights into a short slide deck with example heat maps and bar-chart summaries.

A few takeaways:

• Streamline filters and sorting – fewer controls, smarter defaults.
• Clean up input fields – follow standard patterns and label clearly.
• Unify copy and terminology – pick one: rail / train, flight / air.
• Hide dead ends – don’t show prices that are “N/A” or options you can’t select.
• Cut extra steps – too many confirmations slow booking and confuse less-techy users.
• Progressive results loading – show the first hits fast, keep paging in the rest.
• Consistent error feedback – same style, same place, site-wide.
• Map UX polish – clearer hotel pins, fix the barely-used car map.
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I compiled the findings into a “General UX Improvements” list that was added to the backlog for the next sprint.

Challenge

After Flight Centre acquired FCM, the platform needed a second brand without doubling code to support both the ArrivOn brand as well as the new helloFCBT brand with their brand colors and design guidelines.

Process

• Audited design system to identify how brand colors could work across both brands, something that had not been designed with this in mind when the original look was created.
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• I paired up with a few of the developers to help come up with a good structure of what design needs we had and how they could best refactor CSS styling, naming conventions, icons etc to make this transformation as painless and smooth as possible.

Outcome

• Single code base now powers both brands. New features launch simultaneously across sites. We launched the new helloFCBT site in time.