Stardrift

an experience audit of Stardrift — AI travel search for people who fly a lot — reading the booking flow closely and proposing where it could be clearer.

what it is

Stardrift is AI travel search for frequent flyers — it plans and books the complicated itineraries, the ones that have to fit a real schedule and a real set of preferences.

Leila Clark brought me in early to audit the booking flow and find where it was losing people. what follows is that read — first the flow itself, then the slides, then what i took away from it.

the booking flow, end to end.

general feedback

Slide describing the current agent process for booking complex trips.
Slide highlighting issues with the current booking-page hierarchy.
Slide proposing improvements to the information hierarchy.
Slide calling out inconsistent formatting across the interface.

where the experience loses people — agent state, hierarchy, and formatting.

the booking flow

Slide showing award-flight search results and their issues.
Slide reviewing booking-flow hierarchy opportunities.
Slide comparing booking options and their tradeoffs.
Slide suggesting more clearly clickable card components.
Slide summarizing general improvements to the booking flow.
Slide introducing a new booking-experience concept.
Slide with additional new booking design explorations.

the booking flow, slide by slide, with redesign directions.

what i found

  • the agent feels stalledyou can't tell when the agent is actually working — the text and icons sit static, so it reads as stuck. the status copy should update in real time and say what it's doing.
  • the flight data is hard to trustnumbers show up without labels — which one is the seat count? fees change between screens, which quietly erodes trust. and a plain list makes comparison slow and mentally taxing.
  • the hierarchy needs tighteningbooking buttons look like headers instead of actions, and the primary action isn't visually first.
  • the formatting driftsseveral bullet styles, date formats that vary and feel off-standard, and reasoning text that looks too much like output and blends in.
  • readability has roomtables would make flights easy to compare, and consistent formatting would lift both scannability and the sense of quality.
  • the visuals mostly workthe line-and-dot motif is good, but it should be simpler and used more deliberately — and reasoning should be set apart from output, with block formatting, say.

a note of thanks

thank you to Leila Clark for the chance to work on Stardrift this early. it was a genuine learning experience, and i'm grateful to have spent time on something this ambitious.