DHARMA

Travel · UI/UX

DHARMA runs on passion-based travel — community trips built around shared interests, not destinations. I designed the system and UI for their new booking platform, DHARMA Studio, and later reworked their existing marketplace so both products finally spoke the same visual language, all while the roadmap shifted week to week, startup-style.

Design System

The task

  • Create a coherent and user-friendly design system based on DHARMA’s existing branding

  • Make it simple yet scalable

  • Keep it well organized to facilitate collaboration with other designers and engineers

Challenges

  • With an existing digital product, some pre-existing design system elements had to be updated to create a more well-rounded, easily scalable system

  • While the existing platform was more of a marketing product, the new Studio was to be a highly interactive, user-centric product that required next-level readability and usability

Solutions

  • Typography, color palettes, and spacing were carefully updated and expanded to keep the brand look cohesive

  • A shared UI Library file system was set up in Figma, that allows one source of truth for styles and shared components across all current and future products

DHARMA Studio

The task

  • Create all the UI elements to bring product requirements and wireframes to life

  • Communicate with the rest of the team to iterate on the designs, and make sure business requirements were met

  • Ensure final designs were precise and dev-ready

Challenges

  • At the start, lots of designs were needed as the engineering team had been working on the project for some time already

  • In a fast-paced startup environment, things change quickly and product roadmaps evolve on a daily basis

  • The product went through major shifts during the design and development phase

Solutions

  • The first designs were produced rapidly to help get started with development without delay

  • An open line of communication with the client was maintained at all times, and flexibility was built into the collaboration to account for the hard-to-predict nature of the product environment

  • Workflows and filing systems were put in place to account for the minor and major changes in the product’s direction

DHARMA Marketplace

The task

  • Conduct a visual refresh of the existing marketplace to account for the expansion of the client’s offerings

  • Work with the creative director to make sure the brand’s visual integrity was being preserved

  • Create a new booking funnel interface

Challenges

  • The marketplace showcases a very wide array of products and third party brands, making consistency and brand recognition a delicate balancing act

  • The incremental redesign approach adopted by the client made it difficult to maintain a clear overarching vision

  • A rapidly-changing environment made keeping track of design decisions and iterations challenging

Solutions

  • A tight collaboration with the creative director allowed for both the client’s brand and their offerings to coexist in harmony on the marketplace

  • An atomic approach to the design of UI elements and interfaces meant that a good amount of cohesion was able to persist throughout different changes of directions

  • File annotations, file history/versioning, and close collaboration with the product manager were key to ensure continuity in-between redesign phases

FLEXAI ›