During the fall of 2024, I began my Thesis 1 individual project at Parsons School of Design with a simple but frustrating truth:

Planning events is way harder than it needs to be. It so happened that I was working part-time at a boutique event agency in New York City, and I saw firsthand how overwhelming the process could be, not just for clients, but for planners, vendors, and venues too. That insight led me to create PainPoint, a digital tool designed to streamline the event planning process from both sides. I used primary and secondary research, industry interviews, probe kits, and systems mapping to uncover where the biggest breakdowns were happening. To validate the concept, I created an industry map of over 100+ companies and made sure this wasn’t just a ‘want’, but a ‘need’ for users. The result was a clickable mobile prototype with a UX-focused design that reflected months of research, testing, and iteration. PainPoint was built not just to organize events, but to take the stress out of them.