The AI worked perfectly. It just never made anyone want to go anywhere.
TravAI can plan a comprehensive trip in minutes. The sessions found exactly why that never translated into anyone feeling excited to book one, and what a travel app needs to do differently when every user arrives already burnt out.
Users came looking for a guide. They found a very clever directory instead.
TravAI's AI can plan an entire trip in minutes, comprehensively, accurately, impressively. None of that mattered to users who arrived burnt out from comparing prices across a dozen tabs, because the product they landed in still asked them to do the comparing. The brief was to find out why sophisticated capability wasn't translating into anyone feeling relieved, and what a genuinely guided experience would need to look like instead.
Fourteen sessions. The same gap, from every angle.
The First 60 Seconds and Aspiration Gap sessions, run independently, both landed on the same internal monologue: "Is AI trustworthy? Will this help me, or is it just going to spit out generic answers?" The Heartbreak Scale put a number on it, trust at 2 out of 10, confusion at 4 out of 10, users unsure whether the burden had actually moved off their shoulders at all.
From which one is worth my time to I can do this.
The Feel Factor mapped three layers, first impression, the journey, identity transformation, and found the same problem at every one: sophisticated technology that had forgotten to consider how it made anyone feel. The Aspiration Gap traced the three moments where that gap actually closes. Design Principles turned both into rules specific enough to test any screen against.
One conversation that never asks twice.
From the first question through to the trip hub that still has something to say weeks later. Tap through the screens below.
A stack built around one requirement: the AI has to remember.
Every technology decision was tested against the same product requirement, conversation state and reasoning that persists indefinitely, real-time multi-vendor coordination, and financial transactions that need to be trusted with someone's holiday budget.
A product judged on whether someone feels guided, not just whether the AI ran.
Trust at 2 out of 10 explained almost everything about where the existing experience was losing people, capable technology, wrong sequence. The response was a set of decisions specific enough to hold under deadline pressure, and a build handoff that gave them teeth.
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