The Overview

Alpen is a premium e-bike rental company that partners with luxury hotels and resorts across the southeastern U.S. coast. Guests rent e-bikes through a mobile app. Hotel staff and Alpen's operations team manage everything behind the scenes through a web dashboard.

I led the full product effort at Alpen through Laurel Labs. That meant product strategy, design direction for a team of 2 designers, UX architecture for both the dashboard and mobile app, design system creation, and hands-on business development. I directed the design team through the complete dashboard build while collaborating with 2 developers and reporting into a core leadership team of the CEO, CTO, and COO. My role went well beyond screens. I secured hotel partnerships, led outreach to grow the property portfolio, and had enterprise-level conversations with brands like Marriott Vacation Club. On the product side, I defined user flows for the mobile app, led the ground-up dashboard redesign, and authored the design system that serves as the source of truth for all ongoing development.

This case study covers the full scope of my involvement across the Alpen platform, with a focus on the dashboard as the primary design deliverable.

The Problem

The original Alpen dashboard had grown organically alongside the business and was hitting its limits. Onboarding a new hotel property required repetitive manual data entry with no way to duplicate or template existing configurations. There was no structured hierarchy for managing hotel groups or admin permissions, a problem that gets worse fast when you go from 3 properties to 30. Fleet management and day-to-day operations lived in disconnected workflows, and the UI didn't reflect the premium positioning Alpen maintains with its luxury hotel partners.

That last point matters more than it might sound. When a hotel GM is deciding whether to partner with a vendor, they form impressions from every touchpoint, including the management software their staff will use daily. A clunky admin tool chips away at trust in the product itself.

The brief was clear: rebuild the dashboard to support Alpen's expansion while keeping the operational simplicity that hotel staff need and the premium feel the brand demands.

My Role

Research, user flows & stories, sketching, wireframing, visual design, prototyping, UX consultant

Duration

Nov 2024 - Jan 2026

By the Numbers

  • 20+ Screens Designed

  • 7-8 Target Markets

  • 5 Core Team

  • Fleet ops, pricing, maintenance, staff, and admin controls

  • Coastal and mountain regions across the southeastern U.S.

  • 2 designers, 2 developers, and myself as design lead