Austin Macdowell

Building a design-led card UI framework

Expedia Group / 2025

A number of teams building with the platform I help maintain utilize a framework built specifically for cards. It allows folks to send JSON payloads as part of their skills or tools that render cards in the UI. It was initially built by developers and for developers, so it’s always done a great job at enabling rapid development but over time it’s shown an obvious lack of design standards and become time-consuming and tedious to maintain. It had also started lacking in performance as payloads grew larger and larger due to a lack of guidance or cohesive set of patterns.When migrating to a new version of the framework, we wanted to come up with solutions that would balance rapid implementation and updation, ensure use of consistent design patterns, and create a more stable and scalable workflow for both design and engineering.

First, I partnered with the engineering team in charge of the framework to align schema elements with design intents. This included changes like adding a schema object called a “composition” which stored design decisions for common patterns in a server-side library to reduce payload sizes and codify design patterns. I built out an entire library of these patterns, ranging in size from individual components taken from the design system to entire card patterns for commonly represented entities like property highlights or a refund summary. As part of this effort, I aligned our token infrastructure for spacing, color, and text properties to the broader design system to enable scalability across 40+ brands using the framework.

I built out the library in Figma to establish a source of truth and speed up the design process for our partners while ensuring consistency. As of May 2025, implementation is still in progress so we don’t have solid metrics quite yet, but I’ve gotten good feedback on the workflow from design partners and we’re already seeing the benefits of centralized, server-driven patterns on performance and engineering workflows as well.

Operationally, these updates to the framework enable…

Helping creators launch campaigns faster

Expedia Group / 2023

Myself and a design partner were asked to do a complete visual overhaul of an internal content management system that marketing folks used to send out content. We were on a tight timeline and the architecture of the system had already been determined by an engineering team. Product asked us to design it to help authors send out multiple instances of a “communication” across different channels at the same time. Plus, we were planning to externalize the platform and needed to align with broader industry mental models.

As we started looking at the system and talking to internal users, I noticed a consistent pain point: the architecture of a “communication” confused authors and made it difficult to design a front-end without showing the complexity of the backend.

My focus shifted from UI content to “concept mapping,” where I organized the existing objects in the system and tied them to their attributes to identify areas of improvement. From this, I proposed an additional layer of organization above “communication” that we called a “campaign,” which would allow folks to organize their messaging in a way that made sense to them and reduced complexity in the system.

From this change, I helped…

Assuring users of backend progress

Expedia Group / 2020

While building out an early version of Expedia Group’s proprietary chat platform, we encountered an issue with the loading state for new messages: when a “skill” (virtual agent task) took more than a few seconds, it appeared frozen. We knew this happened consistently for a couple of our more complex skills that required a number of checks on the backend.

We were asked to come up with a design solution for it. The designers I worked with initially came up with a couple solutions that modernized the indicator from a visual standpoint, but still didn’t do much to infer that work was continuing to happen behind the scenes. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to use content to solve a problem.

Where we had presented background updates as “system” messages from the user’s perspective, I proposed we use the updated visual treatment for loading messages to contain rotating content that could be customized for different scenarios. By sending these updates from the perspective of the virtual agent, we built empathy for it and trust in its ability to complete tasks.

After validating with research, we also determined that it…

Systematizing confirmation email content

Expedia Group / 2024

While working in the “Communications” product area at Expedia Group, I joined a project whose goal was to improve & systematize confirmation emails. These are the ones you get when you’ve made a booking; we wanted to create a structure that would flex across all product verticals and allow space for dynamic information while preserving the position of core information throughout.

The design team was a bit bloated and we were still forming partnerships across product and engineering. I quickly determined that I’d be most impactful by focusing on the core information hierarchy. It had been awhile since anyone had validated the order and importance of information we’d been sending folks. An additional ask from our product partners was to significantly shorten the length of emails while adding space for marketing content.

I first conducted a round of internal testing where the working group all did an activity adjacent to affinity mapping to determine what we all found most important in emails of the sort. We then validated our findings with a round of external testing (with help from our research partners). While we didn’t get much clearer signal on the order of information, we gathered enough helpful comments to determine that our internal activity had landed close to general sentiment.

From there, I created a systematized layout of product-agnostic blocks of information with guidance on dynamic content, plus I provided specific guidance for marketing guidance and tone of voice.

My work contributed to a default template that…