TRAVICI
Emerging Tech UX · AR/VR · Conceptual · 2024
Role: UI UX Designer
Type: Mobile Concept
Duration: 15 Days
Tools: Figma · Adobe Suite
THE HOOK
What does UX look like
when the interface is space itself?
Not a screen. Not a button. Not a form.
Every travel platform gives you the same thing: photos, reviews, a price, a booking button. You scroll. You imagine. You guess. And then you commit hundreds of dollars to a place you've never actually felt.
The problem isn't information. Travellers have too much of it. The problem is confidence. Emotional confidence. The kind that only comes from experience — not from reading about one.
What if you could walk through a destination before booking it? Not watch a video of someone else walking through it. Actually walk through it yourself, in space, in your own room, before you'd spent a single rupee.
That's the question Travici was built to answer.
THE PROBLEM SPACE
Travel inspiration is passive.
Travel decisions are permanent.
There's a gap in the middle of every travel experience — between "I want to go there" and "I've booked it." Every platform treats that gap as a conversion problem. Show more photos. Add more reviews. Offer a discount. Click.
But the gap isn't a conversion problem. It's a confidence problem.
The platforms that exist today give you two-dimensional evidence for a three-dimensional decision. You're committing to a place you've never stood in, based on photos taken by people paid to make it look good.
Four things broken in current travel platforms.
01
No spatial understanding.
Images and videos give you a view of a place, not a sense of it. You can't understand scale, atmosphere, or feeling from a photograph.
02
No emotional immersion.
Decision-making is emotional before it's rational. Platforms optimise for information delivery when they should be optimising for emotional connection.
03
No digital memory.
Travel souvenirs are physical, fragile, and disconnected from the digital life we actually live. There's no native way to own a piece of a place digitally.
04
No pre-experience.
You can test drive a car before buying it. You can try on clothes before purchasing them. You cannot experience a destination before booking it. This is the gap Travici fills.
THE UX CHALLENGE
PROBLEMS
-
Users unfamiliar with AR/VR
-
NFT complexity
-
Preventing feature overload
-
Emotional engagement
-
Motion fatigue in VR
SOLUTIONS
-
Guided onboarding and progressive immersion
-
Abstracted Web3 jargon into simple “Collectible” language
-
Step-wise discovery of AR, VR, NFT features
-
Designed for wonder, not utility first
-
Controlled navigation and visual anchors
No platform combines immersive virtual exploration with digital ownership tied to real places. Travici sits at that intersection.
THE SYSTEM
Most AR/VR concepts design features.
I designed a system.
The easiest version of this project would have been: pick one interaction — VR exploration, or AR landmarks, or NFT collection — and design that well. Most concept projects do exactly that.
The harder question was: what if all five had to work together as one coherent experience? Not five features bolted together. One product with five modes — each with its own interaction logic, each serving a different emotional moment in the user's journey.
THE ARCHITECTURE
EXPLORE
EXPERIENCE
INTERACT
COLLECT
VAULT
Five stages. Five interaction paradigms. One system.
Discover
Browse destinations spatially. Cards that feel like windows into places, filterable by Planets, Galaxies, Universes. Not a list. Not a grid of photos.
Experience
Enter VR mode. The interface recedes. The destination expands. Minimal overlays — the UI gets out of the way and lets the space do the work.
Interact
AR layer. Place landmarks in your physical space. This is where the spatial and the physical overlap.
Collect
Own a destination as a digital memory artifact. Proof you were there, even virtually. Limited edition. Tied to the specific experience.
Convert
Book the real trip. Emotional confidence built through five stages of engagement converts to actual travel.
USER JOURNEY
STAGE
DISCOVER
EXPERIENCE
INTERACT
COLLECT
CONVERT
USER
ACTION
Browses destinations
Enters VR
mode
Uses AR
Mints/collects NFT
Books trip
TRAVICI
EXPERIENCE
Immersive previews instead of photos
Walks through locations
Places landmarks in real space
Owns digital travel artifact
Emotional confidence to travel
THE ECOSYSTEM
VR DESTINATION WALKTHROUGHS
Users can navigate inter-galactic spaces and landmarks in a 360° immersive environment.
DIGITAL TRAVEL VAULT
A personal gallery of explored places and owned collectibles.
TRAVEL CONVERSION
Integrated booking after immersive exploration.
AR LANDMARK PROJECTIONS
Place monuments and locations in the user’s physical space using AR.
NFT TRAVEL COLLECTIBLES
Each destination offers limited-edition NFTs tied to the experience.
Five stages. Five different interaction paradigms. One visual system holding them together.
THE DESIGN DECISIONS
Three decisions that made this feel like a product,
not a prototype.
Conceptual projects have no real users, no real client, no real constraints. That's the trap — without constraints, everything becomes hypothetical and nothing becomes specific. The only way to make a concept project credible is to make deliberate decisions and be able to explain exactly why you made them.
Decision 01
Dark UI as a functional choice, not an aesthetic one.
The obvious temptation for a travel app is light, airy, aspirational. Blue skies. White space. Lifestyle photography.
I went dark. Not because it looks cool — because it's functionally correct for the use case. VR and spatial experiences break when the surrounding UI competes with the immersive content. A light interface creates visual noise around the destination imagery. A dark interface recedes. The destination becomes the foreground. The UI becomes the frame.
Every decision — dark backgrounds, minimal overlays, gesture-friendly navigation, high-contrast CTAs — was made to protect the immersive experience, not decorate it.
Decision 02
"Avail Now" instead of
"Book Now."
The destination detail screen has two CTAs: Avail Now and Save for Later.
"Book Now" is a commitment. It creates friction — the user knows they're about to spend money. "Avail" is softer. It means access, experience, begin. It reduces the psychological barrier between browsing and committing — which is exactly the barrier Travici is designed to lower.
One word. Different psychological weight. That's UX working at the vocabulary level.
Decision 03
Abstracting Web3 completely.
NFTs are complex, intimidating, and carry significant baggage for mainstream users. The word "NFT" appears in the product — but the experience doesn't feel like Web3.
The collection mechanic is framed as ownership of a memory, not ownership of a token. The transaction UI looks like collecting a stamp, not trading cryptocurrency. This was a deliberate simplification — not dumbing down, but translating. Making an emerging technology legible to an audience that didn't sign up for a crypto tutorial.
Wonder first. Utility second. That was the brief I gave myself!
THE EXPERIENCE
From exploration to ownership.
One coherent flow.
This is the complete user journey — from first launch to destination collection.
SCREEN BY SCREEN
Dark. Cinematic. No tutorial. The UI sets the emotional register before a single tap.
A question, not a menu. Planets, Galaxies, Universes — the taxonomy tells you immediately this isn't a conventional travel app.
Low information density by design. This screen creates desire, not data. You don't need to read it to want to go.
WHAT I LEARNED
Designing for space taught me something
about designing for people.
Travici is a conceptual project. No real users. No real client. No real constraints. I want to be honest about that — because pretending otherwise would be the wrong lesson to take from it.
What conceptual projects offer is the freedom to ask questions that real briefs don't always permit. And the question Travici kept asking was: what happens when the interface disappears?
01
Systems before features.
Travici only worked when I stopped designing feature by feature and started designing the relationship between features. How Discover leads to Experience leads to Interact leads to Collect leads to Convert. The system is the product.
02
Vocabulary is UX.
"Avail Now" instead of "Book Now." "Collectible" instead of "NFT." Every word in an interface is a micro-decision about friction, trust, and emotional positioning. In emerging tech especially — where the technology itself is unfamiliar — the words you choose determine whether users feel invited or excluded.
03
Constraints are a gift.
Without a client saying no, without real users pushing back, you have to impose your own constraints and then defend them. That discipline is what separates a concept project from a student exercise.
15 days. Self-initiated. Built to explore what spatial UX looks like when wonder is the primary design value.
MORE WORK
Keep exploring.
End-to-end case studies documenting research, strategy, and design decisions.
