How might we make travel less a hassle by alleviating motion sickness?
As air travel gets more popular, it is still uncomfortable for a lot of people, and motion sickness is more than discomfort. It shapes how people plan, endure, and recover from flights.
In 4–5 weeks, our team went from an open brief to a working product: AuraBuds, a smart earphone that uses scientific proven sound frequency to reduce motion sickness, paired with the Aura app, a companion system that learns your body's response over time and personalizes relief.
My role
User Researcher
Product Designer
Design Team
2 Industrial Designers
2 Graphic Designers
1 UX Researcher
Skills
Desk research
User testing
Empathy mapping
User journey mapping
Rapid prototyping
Timeline
Nov – Dec 2025
My contribution
As a UX researcher, I conducted interviews and synthesized insights for generative research, supported by secondary research for scientific grounding. I led usability testing to help the team align on design decisions, and contributed to interface redesign in Figma using AI tools to accelerate prototyping.
Impact & outcome
In five weeks, the team delivered a credible product concept backed by research and validated through testing. We presented at an open house to industry professionals, defending our decisions in real time. Here (opens in a new tab) to see our poster.
Part. 1 Research
Define the question in ambiguity
Our brief was open-ended: our team decided to explore travel space. However, traveling experience covers a lot of ground. When I first brainstormed, I decided to break it down in 3 different scenarios:
- By phases: before, during, after;
- By group: solo, family, with pets;
- By transportation methods: car, train, plane.
To narrow it down, I interviewed 3 participants about their travel pain points. Alongside the interview insights from my teammates, we learned that during flight is the stage that stresses people the most, and people get most frustrated when things are out of their control, especially when traveling with groups or pets and when experiencing motion sickness.
By using an empathy map, archetype, and user journey, we mapped where friction was highest and where existing products fell short, we created the Turbulent Passenger and the Burdened Traveler.
After exploring their journey respectively, we recognized that most of the pain points for Burdened Traveler stem from the needs of their dependents which could be elderly family members, children, or pets. This means addressing their problems would require us to shift focus toward the vulnerable individuals they care for, whose needs are highly varied in different situations and harder to generalize.
Additionally, beyond personal stories, desk research (opens in a new tab) also suggested that roughly 1 in 3 people experience motion sickness. Meanwhile, existing market solutions, such as ear planes (opens in a new tab) and meditation apps, seem passive and disconnected from each other.
Further secondary research gave us a technical foothold: a 2025 study by Gu et al. (opens in a new tab) found that just 1 minute of exposure to a pure tone at 100Hz may significantly reduce motion sickness symptoms. That shaped our design direction and our product concept.
Therefore, we asked
How might we help air travelers feel calm and in control throughout their flight by minimizing motion sickness and turbulence-related anxiety?
Part. 2 Ideation
Design in the age of AI
With our problem defined, we moved into ideation. After individual brainstorms, we put our sketches on a 2 by 2 matrix with user value and easiness to implement as two dimensions. Ideas in the easier-to-implement space included visualizing turbulence on a phone screen, and travel pillows that play soothing music or send calming messages.
Notably, all five team members converged on the same idea: smart earphones paired with a companion app. That alignment, backed by research, pointed to a real opportunity, where a physical-digital system could create real and meaningful impact.
That's how we arrived at Aura, which centers around a smart earphone, AuraBuds, together with the Aura companion app. They're designed to help travelers feel in control of their journey, offering support when it's needed without getting in the way
We leveraged the AI tool, Figma Make, to rapidly generate two versions of the app UI from wireframes and screen specs, then condensed the good design from them into one and tested it with users in a non-airplane environment.
I led validation testing with real market products (ear planes (opens in a new tab)) and suggested 100Hz frequency sound with participants who were actively traveling.
As a result, we found that
- The AI-generated screens felt too generic. They lost the product's identity and users felt fatigued by its design
- The screens were too text-heavy, which could worsen nausea and motion sickness symptoms.
With onsite testing,
- The ear planes performed well: the ceramic filter reduced eardrum pressure effectively.
- While 100Hz sound sometimes resonated with the airplane engine negatively, and 80% of the participants suggested higher frequencies produced better outcomes.
Part. 3 Testing
Understand the nuance in the human
Based on the user feedback, we redesigned product branding, as well as the digital product. The goal is to make the app distinctive, personal, and easy to navigate under discomfort.
I removed unnecessary text from the screens and simplified the home page layout. I used Figma Make again to rapid prototype a working version and verify the flow end-to-end.
In parallel, we deepened the personalization layer. AuraBuds collect biometric data via a built-in accelerometer, gyroscope, and optical heart-rate sensor (PPG).
On onboarding, users input their motion sensitivity baseline, preferred remedy methods, and flight details which the app uses to pull third-party turbulence track data. During the flight, the Aura app collects sensor data and context. After landing, the model runs in the backend and combine all the information so that next time it can recommends whichever remedy works best for that user.
Part. 4 Design Product
Focusing on the goal and designing around real constraints
Rethinking the goal, we wanted to provide relief to passengers and make them feel more in control, something that most people that we talked to struggled the most, especially if they experience motion sickness. The revised design was cleaner, more branded, and better suited to someone who might already be feeling unwell.
Here’s a user journey video I edited, where we created a user profile Daisy, who experiences severe motion sickness but has to travel frequently. All the images and videos were generated by using Gemini Nano Banana and Veo 3.1 respectively.
We presented AuraBuds and the Aura app with the physical product in hand at the end-of-quarter showcase to program alumni, faculty, and industry professionals. The showcase gave us the chance to put the product in front of people with real domain expertise and collect reactions beyond the controlled testing environment.
Next Step
The personalization model is promising but hasn't been tested in real flight conditions with real sensor data. The next step would be to enhance the real functions of physical product and instrument a field study, getting the physical product on actual travelers and validating whether the adaptive remedy recommendations hold up outside the lab.
What I learned
This project put two kinds of constraints in play. The first was time: four weeks is not enough to run research the way a textbook would prescribe, and I had to get comfortable with that quickly. I let the order of things break down when it needed to, and I found that working in that gap was its own skill.
The second constraint was limited design space. Our group decided to design for an in-flight experience, which narrowed the design space significantly, but I think it pushed us toward more creative decisions than an open brief would have. For example, we used AI tools to save time for more important aspects of the project.
Taken together, both constraints taught me to use methods and tools more flexibly. Not cutting corners, but being deliberate about what actually deserved time.