The survey and the interviews were both needed.

People answer a questionnaire one way and describe their own work another way. The questionnaire measures where IUCLID stands today, the interviews bring out what is missing for the people who open it every morning. The survey ran on EU Survey. I wrote the interview guide, the questionnaire and the supporting material.

I anonymised every interview by hand, one at a time.

Transcripts from Teams, manual anonymisation for GDPR, then content analysis and thematic analysis. AI proposed the patterns, I checked them against the transcripts: on anonymised data only, and never through a platform without consent. In Power BI I built a star schema that cross-references the survey figures with the ones drawn from the interviews. Before ECHA I had never opened Power BI.

The hardest part was the calendar.

Every interview needed a colleague alongside me for the technical questions I could not answer, and their diaries changed the plan every week. The second difficulty was running the interviews naturally. At first they were not. I learned to handle both one-to-one and group sessions.

A job planned until the end of October, finished by the end of August.

This was not part of my research. 24 languages, over 500 phrases each to reformat by hand into a template. I proposed handing them to AI: one day tuning the prompt, 83% accuracy, three days of human correction. The AI could not write a slash, so I used XQX as a placeholder, a sequence that does not exist in any of the 24 languages.

The findings come out in the official report and will guide IUCLID’s development.

I presented the work to the team and it landed well. On the content of the research, until publication, I cannot say more.

Four services, four colours.

The four colours come from the Swiss metro. Swiss Style uses bright tones you can read from a distance, which is what a station needs: knowing where to go without stopping to read. They do the same job here, the colour arrives before the label. Manrope across the whole interface.

The only card drawn from scratch is a ticket. Whole for the trips ahead, torn for the archived ones.

The trip’s status sits in the shape of the object, so you neither remember it nor read it. Tearing is a gesture the user knows from the physical world. And a work trip is often team bonding too: the stub left in a pocket says that trip happened. Building it taught me Figma features I had not used.

Hover a service and it fills with its colour.

I handled the prototype’s micro-animations. Short, tied to the transport colour code, and built to recall a metro line: the button opens the way a route extends.

One user, no changes.

Eye-tracking test with one person. The equipment belonged to the course; I gave the tasks and asked the questions. We had predicted a precise order: the black new-experience button first, then quick booking by service, then the trips in progress and the past ones. The gaze followed that order, so we changed nothing. In my thesis I had designed a protocol around that same instrument, so I knew what to measure.

I was wrong.

I thought a tour operator and a travel creator had nothing in common. Netnography and interviews said otherwise, and I found the common ground in reviews: for anyone who lives off an audience, perception is worth as much as the product. The creator cannot afford to recommend a bad trip, Alidays lives on trips people remember. They sell the same thing, the credibility of whoever promises it will be memorable.

“We are at the mercy of the algorithm.”

The creator loses reach without posting constantly, and does not know the rules the algorithm rewards them by. Brands often pay in products, sometimes at ninety days. Travelling alone, they organise everything themselves. The platform gives them a scheduled collaboration, with dates and fees agreed before departure.

The creator proposes, then builds.

Two routes were open: a running conversation with an Alidays contact, or a proposal that travels on its own. We chose the second. The creator uploads the trip, an Alidays employee reviews it asynchronously, and the document changes many times before approval. Then the creator leaves on a trial trip, checks that it holds up, and only then does the package go on sale.

Why it pays for both.

Alidays gets packages it would not have built alone, and the creator’s followers booking them. The creator gets a pilot trip, covered in full or in part depending on the contract, and the content to publish on the way back.

We took the patterns from Notion, Airbnb and WeRoad.

Silvia comes to the product with deadlines and content to produce. Every new pattern she has to learn is time taken from her work, so we used patterns she already knows. WeRoad for the group trip, Airbnb for the stay, Notion for a document that keeps changing.

The usability test asked us to simplify. The calendar did not allow it.

The prototype test pointed to screens that needed to be less technical. We could not get those changes into the final design: the course ended there.

• Traineeship in Product Management, Requirements EngineeringECHA, Helsinki03-08/2026
• Mapping for the “Bosco di Oz” project, freelanceAPS Lapsus04-05/2026
• UX/UI Designer, including pro-bonoIndependent projectssince 04/2025
• Teaching assistant, cognitive artifact designSuor Orsola Benincasa10/2024-02/2026
• Traineeship in Interaction Engineering, automotive HMIRe:Lab10/2022-03/2023

• Executive course in UX and UI DesignPOLI.design03-06/2025
• Apple Developer Academy2023-2024Federico II University
• M.Sc. in Psychology: cognitive ergonomics. 110/110 cum laude. Thesis in Interaction Design on the driver’s cognitive loadSuor Orsola Benincasa2021-2024
• B.Sc. in Psychological Sciences and TechniquesFederico II2016-2020