Rebuilt a travel system nobody could maintain
The legacy system was retired
WET Design builds large-scale water features, the Bellagio fountains among them. Their internal travel-request app had outlived the person who wrote it: undocumented, desktop-only, and effectively frozen. I ran the interviews, designed it, and built it, as a team of one on a one-month timeline.
Also in this role
- Redesigned and deployed the company intranet, turning it into the primary source of company updates. Time on page rose 25%, about 30 seconds
- Sketched and consulted with the branding team on interface direction and technical feasibility before build
The system before
Three things were wrong with the app it replaced, and only one of them was visual.
It couldn’t be maintained. The person who built it had left, taking the knowledge with them. The documentation that remained was close to useless. Changes that should have been routine weren’t happening at all.
It couldn’t be adjusted. Altering a form field or adding an email setting was disproportionately difficult, so the form drifted further from what the travel manager actually needed with every passing month.
It couldn’t be reached. The app was desktop-only. At a company whose employees spend their days building fountains in the field rather than sitting behind a desk, that made the tool useless at exactly the moment someone needed it.
Finding the actual objective
The brief I was handed was “replace the legacy travel management system.” That’s a description of the work, not a goal, so I interviewed the travel manager and the employees filing requests before designing anything.
Two things came out of it that weren’t in the brief. The travel manager needed strong admin functionality, because she was the one absorbing every gap in the old form as manual follow-up. And employees needed to add context to a request, because a trip to a job site isn’t a set of dropdowns and the old form forced them to file something not quite true and then explain it over email.
That reframed the project: not a port, but an intuitive, streamlined app with real admin tooling behind it.
Designing it inside someone else’s brand
WET had a large design department and a comprehensive brand book. The app was internal, but aligning it with the brand was a stated objective, since internal tools are still the company talking to its own staff.
I worked from the primary brand colors, red and black, and added pink as an accent, which isn’t in the book. Pink reads as warm and happy, it’s a hue of the brand red so it sits inside the existing system rather than fighting it, and against travel it carries a useful note of urgency and play. It let an internal utility feel like it belonged to the company without looking like a form.
What shipped
An intuitive, modern app that worked on both desktop and mobile, built in Vue with SASS and GraphQL. A manager’s home page for the admin side, and a request form that finally let people say what they actually needed.
The old system was phased out.
What I’d do differently
I inherited an app that died with its author and then built its replacement alone, in a month, at a company I left five months later. I documented the design decisions but not the system, which means I handed over the same problem I’d been hired to fix, just newer.