Case Study
SEVN APP
A curated guide to Las Vegas beyond the Strip: local picks, organized by neighborhood, zero paid placements.
A curated guide to Las Vegas beyond the Strip: local picks, organized by neighborhood, zero paid placements.
SEVN is a curated travel guide app for Las Vegas that goes beyond the Strip. Instead of generic top-ten lists and algorithm-driven recommendations, SEVN surfaces hand-picked locations from locals who know the city: restaurants, bars, coffee shops, outdoor spots, and hidden gems organized by neighborhood and category.
I joined as the product designer responsible for the end-to-end mobile-first experience: from the discovery flow and neighborhood exploration to personalized recommendations and category filtering. The goal was to make finding great places in Vegas feel effortless, trustworthy, and genuinely local.
Las Vegas attracts over 40 million visitors a year, yet most of them experience the same handful of over-promoted spots. Existing travel apps rely on paid placements and review volume, which means tourists end up at the most marketed restaurants, not the best ones.
Meanwhile, locals who know the city’s real gems had no meaningful platform to share that knowledge. The result was a two-sided problem: visitors overwhelmed by generic, ad-driven recommendations, and a thriving local scene that remained invisible to the people who would love it most.
Every time friends visit, they ask me where to eat. I always send the same list of spots none of them have ever heard of, and they always text back saying it was the best meal of their trip.
I owned the end-to-end mobile experience, the discovery flow, neighborhood exploration, category filtering, and personalized recommendations, grounded in interviews with both tourists and Las Vegas locals. The whole product rested on one belief: a real person’s pick beats an algorithm’s ranking.
Two decisions carried the design:
