We were tasked with redesigning the UX of Travel + Leisure’s annual World’s Best Awards tentpole - one of our brand’s highest-visibility experiences - under extreme constraints: a tight 3-month timeline, new offshore teams, and a sponsorship deal requiring a specific volume of ad impressions. The existing UX lacked clarity, brand polish, and meaningful engagement.

I led the design strategy and delivery for the full experience, managing an IC designer, aligning cross-functionally with a new product/dev team, and navigating approvals from senior stakeholders. I facilitated weekly alignment across teams and ruthlessly prioritized UX ideas to stay within scope. A key output was a redesigned World’s 100 Best Hotels article: a new filterable tool-like layout with glanceable hotel cards designed to drive interaction and session duration. Within the full tentpole experience, we introduced improved global and in-page navigation for better wayfinding and to surface hidden content.

Within 48 hours of launch, we achieved over 30% of our end-of-year ad impression goal and saw increased time-on-page for the Hotels tool. Usability tests showed that users found the redesign intuitive and helpful. The success demonstrated what was possible when pushing past technical constraints to deliver a high-polish, high-stakes brand experience under pressure.