Flair is the social flight tracker for people who love to travel. Log every flight, share trip memories, and see who's flying the same routes as you.
Duration
Mar-Jun, 2026
Role
Designer & Developer
The UX Challenge: Flying often feels like a chore and the memories while traveling get lost across camera rolls. Currently, there is no dedicated space for passengers to reflect on journeys or keep their travel memories stored in one place.
The Technical Challenge: Beyond designing the experience, I wanted to ship a live product, despite having zero prior mobile development or App Store deployment experience.
Design and build a social travel app from the ground up. An app that makes logging and sharing flights feel like part of the trip itself, brings every journey into one connected home, and teaches me end-to-end product development along the way.
The more you travel the more your map fills up. Keep sharing your flights and watch you globe fill!
Track miles flown, countries visited, top routes, and more.
Share every travel memory and explore new destinations.
To bridge the gap between design and production, I structured my research around three guiding inquiries:
Flighty handles live logistics while Polarsteps supports post-trip journaling. The opportunity was the missing middle: anticipation, in-air emotion, and lightweight social sharing around each route.
I explored prompting strategies, architecture, and the translation of visual components into executable SwiftUI and React Native code.
I investigated development environments, Git workflows, and deployment pipelines needed to turn mockups into a real, installable product.
Iterating with AI initially proved challenging due to its linear generation flow. Without a native undo mechanism, bad outputs could easily derail functional features and left me just restarting many times with different LLMS. Once I integrated Git repositories into my workflow, everything changed. Learning to branch and commit allowed me to treat code like design artboards: a sandbox to explore alternative interactions, test edge cases, and merge stable iterations safely.
A broken native-module build exposed the cost of iterating without reliable rollback points.
The first generated interface established the core flight flow but revealed hierarchy and usability gaps.
Branching and commits made it possible to compare alternatives, preserve stable work, and refine the experience safely.
Flair went from a blank canvas to a live App Store app in three months: designed, built, and shipped by myself. Users can log flights, track stats like miles flown and countries visited, and see their travel history mapped on a live globe, turning what used to be scattered memories into one connected feed.
Fill your globe
Watch your globe fill as you log in more flights. Fill it all up!
Share the story
Attach photos, captions, and memories to every trip you take.
Log every flight
Add your flights in seconds and keep a running log of everywhere you’ve been.
Watch your stats grow
Track miles flown, countries visited, and your route history on a live globe.
Ask for “the rooftop photo from May” and it’s already there.
The designer's role can stretch further than handoff. I shipped Flair without knowing how to code or how to ship an app. AI got me surprisingly far, but the biggest lesson was where it stopped helping. AI answers the questions you know to ask. It can't tell you what you don't know exists. When I hit a wall on trying to make iterations or saving my work, going back and forth with AI was slower than asking my developer friends, who introduced me to concepts I didn't have words for yet, like repositories and how a project is set up. One conversation with them saved me days of guessing.
Knowing which tool or person fits the problem is a design skill. I used AI for speed, people for context, and my own taste to decide what was worth building at all. That judgment, not the ability to write code, is what got Flair out the door.
