Category: AI-First Product Design / Travel & Hospitality / Concept R&D

Role: Product Strategy, UX Architecture, AI Interaction Design, Prototyping

Live Prototype: Figma

StayOS - AI First Trip Organiser

StayOS is a self-initiated R&D project asking a simple question: what would Airbnb look like if it were designed today, AI-first, from the ground up?

Airbnb’s interface is a product of the search era — filters, grids, and endless scrolling. It is very good at showing you rooms. It is not designed to help you decide. StayOS replaces that model with one that reads intent in plain language, weighs trade-offs on the traveller’s behalf, and returns a small set of well-reasoned trip proposals instead of hundreds of listings.

Airbnb returns four hundred listings. StayOS returns three — and tells you why.

The Challenge

Every major booking platform pushes the cognitive load onto the traveller:

Filter fatigue — a human need (“somewhere quiet, safe for the kids, with parking”) has to be hand-translated into a dozen checkboxes
Choice overload — hundreds of near-identical results, ranked by a relevance nobody can see
Invisible trade-offs — the cheaper stay is forty minutes further out and up three flights of stairs, but nothing says so until after you’ve booked
Listing-level thinking — the platform sells rooms; the user is planning a trip

The decision itself is left entirely to the user, reverse-engineered from photos and an hour of review-scrolling.

My Role

StayOS needed to:

Capture intent in natural language, not filter panels
Return fewer options — three, not three hundred
Make the reasoning visible: why this, what you gain, what you give up
Think in trips — stay, parking, experiences, and daily life around the property
Keep the human in control: every AI assumption editable, every permission optional

This was not a visual refresh. It was an interaction-model change — the AI is the interface, not a chatbot bolted onto a search page.

This was not about better search. This was about better decisions.

My Approach

Intent Over Filters

The journey begins with a sentence, not a search bar.
- Natural-language trip intent
- Editable AI assumptions
- Trade-off dials instead of checkboxes

3, Not 300

Forty-one stays scanned. Three proposals returned.
- Each one named for the traveller it actually suits
- not ranked by an algorithm the user can’t see.

Visible Reasoning

What you gain. What you compromise.
- Confidence level on every proposal
- The first 24 hours simulated before you commit

The Outcome

StayOS demonstrates that an AI-first interface succeeds by removing decisions, not by adding features — the measure is how much the traveller no longer has to do.

What was built: 16 screens covering the full journey from intent to active trip · a functional deployed prototype · a clickable Figma prototype with 85 wired interactions · two phases of product and research documentation.

What changed for the traveller: a filter panel replaced by one sentence of intent · hundreds of results reduced to three explained proposals · eight decision criteria compared side by side that a user would otherwise assemble by hand across a dozen browser tabs · trade-offs and friction surfaced before booking rather than discovered on arrival.