Designing away assumptions for a new generation of digital travellers.
I led UX for the early HomeTown experience at GoZayaan, helping turn a new business idea into a travel product designed around the realities of Bangladeshi migrant workers.
02 / PROJECT AT A GLANCE
A commercial product built around a focused human problem.
The project was not a skin on top of GoZayaan. It required a different interaction model, different communication, and different assumptions about what users already knew.
My role
UX Lead — UX strategy, journey architecture, interaction design, product feature/journey discussions, design direction and UX copy guidance.
Business goal
Create a viable digital travel business for an underserved customer segment.
Stage & timeline
Joined at idea stage · 0→1 · approximately 5–6 months in 2022.
UX goal
Make travel purchasing understandable and trustworthy without requiring users to learn conventional OTA behaviour first.
Worked with
CBO/VP, CEO, UI designer, CTO, App Lead, CX, Marketing and product/business stakeholders.
Constraints
Digital fluency, trust, unfamiliar travel terminology, passport/document literacy, airline/integration limitations and launch pressure.
FEATURED UX RESEARCH ARTIFACT / ORIGINAL NOTION REPORT / 25 DEC 2022
I wrote the usability test screen by screen—not as a generic checklist.
The original HomeTown research plan paired real product screens with a clear user goal, behaviours to watch and questions to probe. The samples below are taken directly from that 2022 plan.
SCREEN-WISE CHECKLIST
For every critical screen, I defined what success meant before asking a single question.
A few examples from the original report
Main goal: After going through the screen, do they have proper knowledge about the baggage?
Main goal: User understands that the price has changed.
Main goal: Understanding that s/he has done everything but the payment.
03 / CONTEXT
Travel was already digital. But not for everyone.
Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore had genuine travel demand, yet the existing digital booking model assumed familiarity with pricing, airline language, document entry and online transactions.
- 1Worker needs to travel home
- 2Relies on agent / community help
- 3Makes a high-value purchase with limited transparency
- 4Faces uncertainty around ticket, baggage, documents and payment
04 / THE PROBLEM BENEATH THE BRIEF
How do you simplify a complex transaction without asking the user to become an expert?
Business problem
An underserved segment had strong purchasing demand, but the standard OTA model was not necessarily the right experience for them.
User problem
Users needed to understand, trust, choose, enter unfamiliar information and pay confidently — without the travel vocabulary digital products usually assume.
Product problem
Make an inherently complex transaction understandable while preserving the integrity of a real airline booking flow.
05 / ROLE & OWNERSHIP
I led UX — but HomeTown was a cross-functional product effort.
My work sat across product definition, design execution, engineering guidance, CX learning and communication. The boundary matters: later HomeTown evolution continued after I left.
I owned / contributed directly
UX strategy and journey architecture · User flows and interaction design · Wireframes and UI direction · Feature and journey discussions with Product · UX guidelines for Tech · UX copy / communication guidance · CX feedback synthesis · Research interview guidance · Post-launch UX iteration
Worked closely with
CBO / VP — product and business direction · CEO — strategic alignment · UI designer — daily design guidance · CTO + App Lead — feasibility and implementation · CX — user perspective and support feedback · Marketing — communication and UX copy
06 / ECOSYSTEM
The interface was only one part of the journey.
A ticket purchase depended on people, operations, airline inventory, payment systems, family context and support. UX had to coordinate the whole experience, not just the app surface.
Migrant worker
Needs clarity, trust and independence
Community / “boro bhai”
Existing trust and decision support
HomeTown
Guided digital transaction
Operations + CX
Support, fulfilment and feedback
Airline / inventory systems
Availability, fare rules and technical limits
07 / WHAT WE LEARNED
The real friction was not “too many screens.” It was too much assumed knowledge.
Four observations shaped the product direction.
01 · Conventional OTA density
Observation: many travel products expose several decisions and attributes together. Implication: break the journey into smaller decisions.
02 · Fare + baggage mattered
Observation: the audience prioritised practical purchase signals over secondary airline detail. Implication: change information hierarchy.
03 · Document entry was a knowledge problem
Observation: sometimes the user did not know where required information existed on the passport. Implication: teach in context, not in a help centre.
04 · Trust came before conversion
Observation: technically usable was not enough for an unfamiliar high-value transaction. Implication: design confidence alongside efficiency.
08 / FROM INSIGHT TO PRODUCT STRATEGY
Instead of teaching people conventional travel UX, we changed the UX.
One decision at a time
Longer journey → simpler screens → clearer next action.
Don’t explain when you can show
Use contextual visual/video guidance for passport information.
Design around the actual decision
Prioritise information this audience uses to choose.
Confidence before efficiency
Familiar language, explicit states and progressive confirmation.
DESIGN AWAY ASSUMPTIONS.
09 / DEFINING THE EXPERIENCE
A complex booking journey, deliberately decomposed.
The goal was not to make airline booking intrinsically simple. It was to make the next decision always obvious.
- 01Search
- 02Travel decision
- 03Flight choice
- 04Traveller details
- 05Documents
- 06Review
- 07Payment
- 08Confirmation
10 / HARD DECISIONS
The strongest UX choices were trade-offs, not decorations.
These are the moments where the product deliberately chose comprehension, reliability and guided learning over conventional interface efficiency.
01 · Fewer taps ↔ fewer decisions
We deliberately made the journey longer.
Conventional booking optimisation often means fewer screens. For this audience, compressing the flow meant placing more decisions on each screen. We accepted more taps to reduce cognitive load and make the next action unmistakable.
02 · Design with technical reality
Seat selection could not be supported through the airline integration available at the time. Rather than imply a capability users could not actually complete, we designed around the bookable journey we could reliably support.
03 · Explanation → guided learning
Instead of adding paragraphs of helper text, the product showed users where to find passport information through visual/video guidance while they were completing the task.
11 / EXPLORATION & ITERATION
The useful artifact is not “all the versions.” It is the decision between versions.
Use this section to curate only the changes that reveal what the team learned.
Flight selection
V1 / frictionToo much secondary information
→V2 / why it wonFinal hierarchy prioritised the purchase decision
Traveller information
V1 / frictionField-only entry assumed document literacy
→V2 / why it wonContextual passport guidance reduced the knowledge burden
Journey architecture
V1 / frictionFewer screens concentrated decisions
→V2 / why it wonProgressive steps reduced the number of decisions per state
12 / FINAL EXPERIENCE
Every screen removed an assumption.
The final journey was intentionally progressive: ask one understandable question, expose only useful detail, teach unfamiliar tasks in context, and make urgency explicit.
13 / INTERACTION SYSTEM
The reusable system was behavioural, not only visual.
The product repeated a small set of interaction rules that made unfamiliar tasks feel more predictable.
One primary action
Keep the next decision obvious.
Progressive disclosure
Reveal complexity only when it becomes relevant.
Simple language
Prefer familiar Bengali and practical phrasing.
Visual guidance
Show where information exists when users may not know.
Explicit states
Make payment, eligibility and completion status visible.
14 / RESEARCH & VALIDATION
The plan turned every critical screen into something observable.
Instead of asking “Do you like it?”, the checklist defined what the user should understand, what behaviour to watch, where to probe and how to score the experience.
01 · Objective + method
Understand user behaviour and pain points while using HomeTown. Methods documented: Usability Testing and Eye Tracking.
02 · Comfort first
Choose a suitable time and place and keep participants in their comfort zone. The script was intentionally conversational and written in Bengali.
03 · Scenario coverage
Happy path, date changes, summary edits, ticket for others, ticket-details check, help, video guidance and post-test questions.
04 · Score + probe
Users rated the app from 1–10. If someone scored below 5, the plan explicitly asked what would make the experience better.
- 01Set comfort
- 02Run real tasks
- 03Observe behaviour
- 04Ask what changed
- 05Score & improve
15 / BEFORE → AFTER
Not prettier UI. A different relationship with the transaction.
Buying travel required knowledge, dependence and interpretation.
Dense comparison, unfamiliar terms, document uncertainty and reliance on others.
The user could progress independently, one understandable decision at a time.
A guided transaction designed around the audience’s mental model rather than industry convention.
16 / IMPACT
Early traction became a much larger product story.
I separate the outcomes I observed during my chapter from the scale HomeTown reached later.
User impact
Clearer progression through booking · less reliance on travel terminology · in-context guidance for unfamiliar information.
Early product traction
~1 ticket/week → ~1/day → ~10/week → ~10/day.† A directional adoption signal from the early product period.
Later product scale
By 2025, public reporting described 120K+ downloads, 65%+ active users and expansion from flights into remittance. Shown here as later product evolution.
17 / REFLECTION
HomeTown changed the way I think about simplicity.
“Simplicity isn’t the fewest screens, taps or words. It is the least amount of understanding a person needs before they can make the next correct decision.”
18 / WHAT I’D DO DIFFERENTLY
Measure the behavioural model from day one.
We had stakeholder feedback, CX learning, analytics and post-launch signals. Today I would define the measurement model alongside the first journey.
Completion rate
End-to-end booking completion by cohort
Step abandonment
Where progression confidence breaks
Assistance usage
Which guidance users actually need
Time to complete
Whether “more screens” creates harmful delay
Conversion by iteration
Tie specific UX changes to behavioural movement
19 / CLOSING
HomeTown taught me that designing for inclusion isn’t making a conventional product slightly easier.
Sometimes the product itself needs a different logic.
What started as a focused flight-booking problem grew into a broader platform serving migrant workers across travel and financial services. My chapter was at the beginning: helping define how that experience needed to behave and turning that thinking into a product.
VIEW PRODUCT WORK