Cairn
A trip planner that drops the attractions you want into an hour-by-hour schedule and pushes the whole thing to your calendar.
2025
Designer & Developer
Full-Stack, UX/UI
Aahil Nishaad, Afnan Tuffaha, Luis Sarmiento, Vichu Selveraju, Kai Tjia
The Problem
Planning a trip around activities that are already locked in, like a flight or a wedding, is slow and easy to get wrong. And once you've booked around a mistake, unwinding it is difficult and time-consuming.
The Solution
Cairn starts from what's already on your calendar and builds around it. You tell it what you're into, and it recommends activities, times, and slots things in automatically.
User Research
We leaned on secondary research, primarily a 2024 Talker Research survey of 2,000 Americans who travel at least three times a year.
Affordability and overspending are the two biggest pain points. 44% worry about spending too much, and 51% say they pick a vacation destination based on price.
Those money worries cluster around lodging, transport, and food.
Most people plan through search engines (60%) and travel agency sites (54%), which is what Cairn has to emulate.
Key Design & Engineering Decisions
→ Stateless by design. Cairn retains nothing. The user provides their schedule, the application gives back an itinerary, then it forgets you were there. We gave up saved trips for privacy and speed.
→ Built for speed. There's no account to set up, so planning takes minutes. Research showed that users dreaded the hours of planning, so we kept the application lean.
→ Tailored recommendations. Money was the top complaint, so before Cairn suggests anything, onboarding asks about your budget, what you like, and how you travel.
Iteration
Outcomes
Shipped a full-stack application end to end within two weeks, from UX research through a React/Express app running on Azure.
Takeaways
→ Ran a fast UXR-to-design-to-development cycle in a team environment, working in Agile the whole way.
→ Picked up new technologies like Azure Container Apps in the process.
Retrospective
→ With no real user base to test against, we had to lean on other UXR strategies to validate the work.
→ User profiles and a database would let people save and manage trips in the app but could contradict the quick and ephemeral values of the platform.