UX&UI / 2026
Elva — Designing for Calm in the Most Stressful Moment of a Person's Life
Product design · UX strategy · Content design · Visual design
"What was delivered wasn't just a redesign — it was a completely different way of thinking about how our product makes people feel. The bookings page now looks and feels like Elva at its best: warm, clear, and genuinely reassuring. Our employees open it and they feel taken care of."
— Antonia Eneh, Co-founder & CEO, Elva
The Challenge
Elva is an AI-native relocation platform handling the entire end-to-end process — work permits, flights, accommodation, local registrations — all in one place. But the employees using it aren’t moving deals through a CRM; they’re moving their entire lives, trusting Elva to handle details that matter enormously to them. For a product like this, UX isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the product. I was brought in to redesign the Bookings page: the surface where employees see every scheduled appointment, flight, and accommodation throughout their relocation.
Client request:
“We need the bookings page to feel world-class — not like a list of items to check off, but like something that makes our employees feel genuinely looked after. Clear, calm, beautiful.”
— Antonia Eneh, Co-founder & CEO, Elva
Design consultant · Feature lead
Brought in specifically for this feature.
My scope covered:
- UX strategy and content design
- Information architecture and hierarchy
- Interaction and emotional design
- Visual design and brand application
- Handoff to engineering
A list of bookings isn't what users need
The original bookings page was functional. It showed the bookings. Biometric appointment, flight, accommodation — each one in a card, each card roughly equal in weight. Clean enough. Organised enough.
But functional and reassuring are not the same thing.
Design decisions from the inside
User insight: the anxiety wasn't about missing information — it was about the feeling of holding too many unknown variables in a process they'd never been through before.
I didn’t run a formal research sprint. I worked closely with the Elva team — who have direct, continuous access to their relocating employees — to understand the emotional texture of the experience.
User persona
Sofia, Software Engineer Relocating from outside the EU — her first time
Sofia is excited and terrified in equal measure. She’s never relocated internationally, and the stakes feel enormous. She checks her email constantly, and opens Elva multiple times a day — not because there’s anything new, but because checking makes her feel more in control.
She doesn’t need more data, more links, or more cards. She needs to know everything is in order, what happens next and in what sequence, exactly what to bring — and the feeling that someone has already thought of everything so she doesn’t have to.
The solution: world-class means emotionally intelligent
A timeline, not a list
The original page showed bookings as isolated cards. The redesign connects them into a timeline — biometric appointment, then flight, then accommodation — making the sequence visible. This serves both a practical and emotional need: users understand how everything connects, and the eye naturally follows the sequence forward, creating a sense of progress rather than a list to manage.
Destination first, three-level cards
Before any data appears, a beautiful image of Helsinki sets the emotional register — from “I have to manage this” to “I’m going somewhere.” Each booking card then carries three deliberately weighted tiers: status and identity at a glance, essential action details (date, time, location) in a stronger block, and supporting reference shown only when needed. The standout addition is “What to bring” — a warm, anticipatory answer to the question users were anxious about before they had to ask.
"The redesign changed how our employees experience Elva at the most consequential moment of their relocation. They open the bookings page and they feel calm. That's exactly what we needed — and it's exactly what the design delivers."
— Antonia Eneh, Co-founder & CEO, Elva
What did I learn?
Design is how Elva earns trust at the most consequential moment. Companies relocating talent globally will choose Elva not just because it works — but because it feels like someone genuinely cares about the people going through this.
The most important reframe on this project: the bookings page is not a list of bookings. It is a reassurance surface. The moment that distinction became clear, every design decision had a clear test: does this add to the feeling of calm, or does it take away from it?
That is what world-class design means in a product like Elva. Not the most technically sophisticated interface. Not the most feature-complete surface. The one that understands what the user is feeling, and meets them there.