Sean Valadão Duarte
Sean Valadão Duarte is a Senior Product & Experience Designer based in Lisboa, specialising in clear, scalable digital products across UX research, strategy and systemised UI. Outside of work, he can usually be found watching Arsenal on the weekends, making ambient tunes in the evenings, and practising his questionable Portuguese whenever he can.
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Work
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Exceptional ALIEN
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Venues NSW
- McGrath
- Optimize Mind Performance
- Novii
- Constantinople
- Sportsbet
- Invocare
- Finstro (Coming soon)
- Redback (Coming soon)
- Powershop (Coming soon)
Exceptional ALIEN
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
Industry: Travel
Time: 8 weeks
Delivered: React native app build
A seamless, engaging travel tool for inspired travellers to connect with creative communities worldwide.
Overview:
Exceptional ALIEN is a travel platform inspiring creative travellers through recommendations from renowned creatives worldwide. Engaged at an early stage, the focus was to deliver an elevated product experience while exploring a clear future-state roadmap.
Task:
Design a simpler, more engaging app experience that clarified the product offering and validated a proof of concept, forming the foundation for a future-state rollout and supporting the next investment round.
Problem:
The app needed to elevate the existing web experience, demonstrate market readiness, and expand the value proposition to a growing audience, while building confidence with prospective investors.
ApproachBrief revision & client focusBefore diving into discovery, our strategy team led a revisionist workshop to reassess the brief, aiming to clarify the value proposition and better align with the product scope already outlined by Exceptional ALIEN’s internal marketing and design teams.
A key insight shared with our product and development team was the concern around sustaining high-value content creation at scale. With this in mind, the design team and I factored scalability into our early thinking for the product’s future state. Below are our initial PS impressions ahead of discovery and ideation.
Problem Statement #1
Focus: Travel Tool
Travellers seek genuine connection and a sense of community wherever they go, but often struggle to find it, as their time is consumed by planning and logistics.
Problem Statement #2
Focus: Content Scalability Roadblock
Exceptional ALIEN’s core value lies in recommendations from its network of creative and influential contributors, but this model introduces ongoing cost pressures and limits scalability as the app grows.
ApproachUnderstanding the ecosystemTo design for a spectrum of motivations, we mapped six archetypes that defined the emotional and behavioural landscape of creative travellers, from those seeking personal growth to those chasing inspiration, belonging, or accomplishment.
Each represented a distinct mindset: The Careerist, The Re-configurer, The Worthy Traveller, The Leisurist, The Creative Follower, and The Bucket Lister.
Together, they revealed that travel holds different meanings, creative expansion, restoration, validation and that every user moves fluidly between absorbing and contributing within the creative ecosystem.
ApproachA two pronged approachOur "How Might We" statements focused on two goals: creating a seamless travel tool for launch to support EA’s next investment round, and exploring solutions for managing future content scalability.
Problem Statement #1
Focus: Travel Tool
How might we deliver an engaging, inspiring experience that motivates EA users to explore locally and abroad, while minimizing the effort required to plan their travel?
Problem Statement #2
Focus: Content Scalability Roadblock
How might we reduce content scalability constraints for Exceptional ALIEN while preserving the quality and inspiration of its travel recommendations?
ApproachReframing the vision
Through a series of small design sprints, we mapped how each persona engaged with the MVP, what inspired them, what overwhelmed them, and where momentum fell away.
The research revealed a clear pattern: users didn’t just want to consume stories; they wanted to contribute, to be part of the creative dialogue rather than passive observers.
For some, that meant saving and mapping their own journeys. For others, it meant sharing insights or hidden recommendations within trusted creative circles.
This discovery reframed the product’s trajectory and crystallised a new North Star: to evolve Exceptional ALIEN from a curated editorial platform into a self-generating community of creative recommendations, where content could grow organically through shared experience.
The resulting framework connected storytelling, discovery, and planning into one adaptive ecosystem: aspirational yet grounded, editorial yet participatory.
Built to grow with its users, the platform supports both public contribution and private sharing within creative networks, laying the groundwork for community-led features and the Added Gems system introduced in later phases.
ApproachReframing the vision
Through a series of small design sprints, we mapped how each persona engaged with the MVP, what inspired them, what overwhelmed them, and where momentum fell away.
The research revealed a clear pattern: users didn’t just want to consume stories; they wanted to contribute, to be part of the creative dialogue rather than passive observers.
For some, that meant saving and mapping their own journeys. For others, it meant sharing insights or hidden recommendations within trusted creative circles.
This discovery reframed the product’s trajectory and crystallised a new North Star: to evolve Exceptional ALIEN from a curated editorial platform into a self-generating community of creative recommendations, where content could grow organically through shared experience.
The resulting framework connected storytelling, discovery, and planning into one adaptive ecosystem: aspirational yet grounded, editorial yet participatory.
Built to grow with its users, the platform supports both public contribution and private sharing within creative networks, laying the groundwork for community-led features and the Added Gems system introduced in later phases.
ApproachConcept & usability testing
The primary goal of our testing was to refine the current iteration of the EA app’s information architecture and overall experience, while validating or challenging its existing features. We focused on four key areas: Concept, Information Architecture, UX Flows, and Features. The testing proved highly effective in validating the initial concepts and structure of the EA travel tool. While several valuable micro-insights emerged, the following represent our key findings.
Local Travller
Not only did testers see this as a great tool for travelling abroad but testers also saw this as a great means to discover new places in their local neighbourhood.
Community Desire
Not only did testers see this as a great tool for travelling abroad but testers also saw this as a great means to discover new places in their local neighbourhood.
Sound Architecture
We tested content & recommendation discoverability along with the community & social offering. Overall users found the experience to be seamless.
Maps A Must Have
Testers emphasised the importance of having a map in-app. They wanted to have transparency on their own location and in-app navigation would be a desire.
Solution
Inspiration & utility
Exceptional ALIEN became a modular, travel-tool-first experience designed to unite creativity, culture, and travel in a single ecosystem, like a playlist, but for travel: a curated, dynamic way to plan journeys all in one place.
Every feature balanced emotion with usability, supporting the majority of user mindsets while establishing the foundations for community and contribution.
Leading with inspiration to provide personalised utility
- Daily releases of curated travel lists — or Playbooks — by globally recognised creatives brought discovery to life from the moment users entered the home dashboard.
- Users could explore interviews, videos, and articles from artists, designers, and cultural leaders, each revealing how place shapes creativity, inpiration and travel.
- A personalised discovery experience invited users to map their interests during onboarding — tailoring their dashboard to surface the cities, creatives, and stories most relevant to their world of curiosity and travel planning.
Streamlined collection of Playbooks and Gems
- Users could collect Playbooks from creators that inspired them and save trusted recommendations — known as Gems — directly into their own library.
- Gems could be grouped into custom Playbooks, creating a flexible and intuitive system for curating personal travel experiences.
- Each user Playbook could be shared, edited, or deleted — giving travellers full control over how they capture memories, plan future trips, or organise creative inspiration locally and abroad.
Smart navigation, filtering, and map view
- Navigation and filtering were designed to be fluid, letting users browse by city, creator, or point of interest.
- An integrated map view displayed Gem locations with deep-link google map linking to help users get to where they want to go.
- The system adapted to context — whether users were exploring locally or planning abroad — ensuring relevance without friction.
Solution
UI approach & scalability
Working closely with the Senior UI Designer, the interface was shaped to feel considered and mature, balancing Exceptional ALIEN’s creative value with clarity, legibility, and smooth, intentional interaction.
Building on the defined look and feel, a scalable design system was established to support content migration from the hero website. This included careful consideration of image sizing and resolution, bespoke formatting rules for edge cases, and clear logic definition to support development handover. Interaction and animation behaviours were also defined to ensure consistency, polish, and continuity across the experience.
Solution
Future scoping
Testing and behavioural insights revealed clear opportunities to extend Exceptional ALIEN beyond its MVP, from platform to community.
Phase 2: Community Engagement
Testing revealed that user profiles helped build relatability, seeing others’ interests, collections, and favourite places allowed users to connect through shared taste.
However, the lite profiles that were tested felt impersonal and data-driven, creating a sense of comparison rather than connection. Users expected more interactivity, such as viewing others’ Playbooks, Gems, or personal photos from places they’d recommended.
Phase 3: Community Contribution
Insights from testing and personas showed a strong desire for dialogue and exchange beyond curated content. Users wanted to converse, validate, and contribute, turning recommendations into collaborative discovery.
Light-touch interactions, such as gem upload capapbility, groups or sharing experiences, could evolve the platform into a living network of creative exchange, where discovery feels personal, social, and self-sustaining. This would also assist in relieving content generation costs through commuity generated recommendations.
Outcome
MVP build & launch
Following multiple iterations of low and high-fidelity wireframes, timelines tied to a second investment round required the Phase 1 MVP to be further streamlined. Several experiential features, including user profiling and maps, were intentionally deferred to post-MVP in order to prioritise immediate business and quarterly goals.
The resulting MVP was designed and built to validate Exceptional ALIEN’s core proposition: an inspirational travel tool layered with early signals of community-driven discovery. Launched initially in the Australian market as a controlled early-adoption geography, the app demonstrated clear market resonance and user uptake, providing tangible proof points that supported EA’s subsequent investment round.
User testing confirmed the strength of the foundational experience while clearly signalling which features would drive the next phase of growth. From both the product team and client perspective, the MVP successfully balanced constraint with ambition—meeting investment requirements while establishing a credible platform for future expansion.
Team
Head of Product (PM) - Russel Privett
Technical Director - Arturo Escartin
Full Stack Developer - Michael Chora
Lead Strategist - Darren Low
Lead UX/UI Designer - Sean Valadão Duarte
Senior UI Designer - Jillian Sun
Tasks
Discovery
Synthesis
Ideation
Workshopping
IA & User Flow Mapping
Roadmapping & Future Scoping
UI Design
Design Systems
Logic Definition & Documentation
Concept & Usability Testing
Backend Content Mapping
QA Testing