As the sole internal UX leader, I became the strategic center of a project that needed alignment as much as it needed design. I pushed back where vendor decisions ran counter to the organization's goals, bridged the gap between creative vision and technical reality, and made the triage decisions that turned a year-overdue initiative into a launched product. One that made a statement in the DMO space for a city that deserves nothing less.
The NYC Tourism + Conventions redesign was supposed to launch more than a year before I arrived. By the time I joined, previous consultants had already walked off the project. The UX director I was told I'd be working alongside was no longer there. The vendor relationships were strained, with decisions being made that ran counter to the organization's vision and no internal voice with the expertise to push back.
I was hired as a designer. I quickly understood the job was something bigger than that.
Becoming the center of gravity
With no UX director in place, I became the internal UX voice for the organization, sitting at the intersection of three competing forces: the development partner, the branding agency leading visual direction, and a stakeholder group inside NYC Tourism where every department had strong opinions about how their section of the site should be represented.
My role became less about designing and more about translating, making sure the creative vision was technically achievable, that development decisions were being challenged when they contradicted the project's goals, and that internal stakeholders understood why certain tradeoffs were necessary. Someone had to hold that center. That became my job.
Triage over perfection
With the project already over budget and more than a year behind schedule, launching everything wasn't an option. I made the call to prioritize ruthlessly, identifying the features and experiences essential for a credible launch and pushing everything else to a post-launch phase.
Two decisions defined that triage. First, the proposed experience had been built with a desktop-first assumption, despite the majority of site traffic coming from mobile users. I pushed to reorient the approach around mobile, which meant rethinking components that had been designed without a mobile perspective at all. Second, several of the more complex design treatments couldn't be built to spec within the constraints we were operating under. Rather than launch something half-finished, I worked with the design team to develop simpler treatments that preserved the design intent without requiring execution the build couldn't deliver on time.
Competitive audit of domestic and international DMO taxonomy — leading with editorial depth over visual spectacle.
Most destination marketing organizations can lead with spectacle. Their cities are singular enough to be sold visually — a skyline, a beach, a landmark. New York doesn't work that way. It's too dynamic, too layered, too many things to too many people at once. A purely visual approach would flatten it.
The answer was editorial. NYC Tourism had an in-house photo and video team, social accounts with millions of combined followers, and decades of stories, history, and cultural texture to draw from. The site leaned into that — letting storytelling carry the experience rather than trying to out-spectacle cities with far less to say. The design supported the content rather than competing with it. For a city as complex as New York, that was the right call.
What shipped and what it meant
NYC Tourism + Conventions launched a fully redesigned digital experience alongside a new name and brand identity — a significant moment for one of the world's most recognized destination marketing organizations. The rebrand debuted in conjunction with the #WhatsGoodNYC social campaign, tapping into the authentic perspectives of New York's 8.5 million residents to drive global awareness.
The results exceeded expectations. The rebrand earned a Silver Honor at the 16th Annual Shorty Awards in the Rebrand Campaign category — recognition that the work landed beyond the organization and registered in the broader industry.
188M
Print & digital out-of-home impressions
6.4M
Digital media reach
689K
Video views at launch
78
New B2B RFPs generated post-launch
The site had no filtering or search experience at launch. I designed and implemented both — giving visitors a way to navigate a content library spanning five boroughs, dozens of neighborhoods, and hundreds of venues, restaurants, and events.
The newsletter signup experience got a similar rethink. The original form asked for too much up front, and users abandoned it. I redesigned it using progressive disclosure — breaking the form into stages so the initial ask felt low-commitment. Newsletter signups during Fall Broadway Week 2025 were up 27% year over year, the first major campaign cycle after the redesign went live.
Post-launch analytics tracked how users engaged with redesigned pages and key program experiences. These weren't vanity metrics — they were behavioral signals that validated the triage calls made during the project and showed where the UX decisions landed with real users.
42+ min
Average session duration on high-priority pages like Broadway Week and Epic NYC
15x
Above average newsletter conversion rate on the NYC Winter Outing page
110K+
Outbound clicks to ticketing partners including Telecharge and SeatGeek
9.3%
Click-through rate on primary CTAs－among the most engaged elements on the site
84.8%+
Engagement rate on mobile filters like Neighborhood and Cuisine selectors
30-40min
Engagement times across multilingual content in ES, FR, PT, and DE
Worth noting: The 84.8% mobile filter engagement directly validated the decision to push back on the desktop-first approach during triage. The multilingual engagement times confirmed that designing for global audiences — not just English-speaking visitors — was the right call for a city as diverse as New York.