Designing for Decision Making:
Case Studies Across Shopping, Security, Biometics, App Engagement, and Delays

My work examines how people decide and act in complex, time-bound experiences—especially when those experiences are shaped by digital tools, automation, and AI. I work at the intersection of customer experience research and product strategy, drawing on a long-standing academic interest in deliberation, trust, commitment, and how reasons hold together over time.

Across projects, I focus less on isolated features and more on the continuity of human reasoning as situations unfold: how plans form, how expectations shift, how confidence erodes or stabilizes, and how systems either support judgment—or fracture it.
In travel, those dynamics are unusually visible, because the journey forces decisions to happen in sequence, under pressure, with real consequences.

Travel is not a single interaction. It is a sequence of actions and re-actions: intentions formed early, commitments made, conditions updated, and choices revised as the world pushes back. I organize my work diachronically—by when deliberation happens and what kind of reasoning is demanded at that moment: anticipation, navigation, identification, recovery.

Below are a few research spaces that follow that arc. Each case study stands on its own, but together they track a single theme: how technology shapes judgment, trust, and action over time.

Pre-travel: planning, anticipation, and commitment

Before a trip begins, travelers form intentions they’ll have to carry forward—sometimes for weeks. Increasingly, those intentions are shaped in collaboration with AI systems that don’t just retrieve options, but curate them: they summarize trade-offs, recommend bundles, and quietly shape what counts as a “good” choice.

My work in this space examined what happens to human deliberation when planning starts outside the airline’s ecosystem—inside copilots, aggregators, and conversational tools—and then must continue inside company-owned channels where the commitments become real: purchase, rules, fees, constraints, timing. The question isn’t only conversion. It’s continuity: can a system participate in someone’s reasoning without forcing them to restart it?

Case Studies

• AI Planning & Purchase
  How AI reshaped travel deliberation—and what that implied for explanation, provenance, and continuity of reasoning.
  → View case study

• Security Wait Times
  How travelers planned around uncertainty at the airport, and how time ranges influenced confidence, arrival behavior, and perceived control.
  → View case study

Day of travel: from abstract plans to embodied navigation

On the day of travel, planning gives way to execution. Deliberation becomes embodied: when to leave home, where to wait, which checkpoint to choose, what to trust, when to conserve energy, when to act. People stop “optimizing” and start adapting—often by moving between tools in real time.

My work here focused on day-of-travel mobile engagement as the interface between abstract planning and physical navigation. Travelers rarely rely on a single app; they assemble a working system out of airline tools, operating-system features, maps, messages, wallets, and increasingly, LLMs. That constant switching isn’t noise—it’s a signal of what the core experience is missing, and where travelers feel forced to supply their own coordination.

Case Study

• Day-of-Travel Mobile Engagement
  A diary study of how travelers actually used—and worked around—airline apps across the full travel day, informing “travel mode” experiences that prioritize what matters when time is tight.
  → View case study

Identity, access, and friction at critical moments

Some moments in travel compress time, identity, and risk into seconds: dropping a bag, proving eligibility, clearing a checkpoint, resolving a mismatch. Here the stakes of design are not convenience alone, but confidence and dignity—especially when the system is deciding who you are and what you’re allowed to do.

These projects examined recognition under pressure: what builds trust in automated identity systems, what prevents adoption even among eligible users, and how exceptions and uncertainty shape behavior at the exact moments when travelers have the least capacity to deliberate.

Case study

• Touchless ID & Biometric Bag Drop
  Adoption, trust, and non-use in biometric systems—and what stopped eligible travelers from opting in.
  → View case study

Disruption, repair, and post-decision judgment

When travel breaks down—through delays and irregular operations—deliberation takes on a different form. Travelers are no longer choosing among good options; they are judging fairness, acknowledgment, and effort after the fact. They’re asking: Was I taken seriously? Did anyone try? Did the system recognize what this cost me?

My work in this space explored how the timing, type, and delivery of compensation shaped perceived fairness and downstream loyalty. The most interesting finding here is rarely about “more money.” It’s about thresholds, signaling, and credibility—small, feasible changes that produce outsized perceptual lift because they align with what people already think the situation means.

Case study

• Delay Compensation & NPS
  How timing, type, and delivery of compensation influenced perceived fairness and downstream loyalty during delays.
  → View case study