Portal Thermaculture

Overview

Portalº Thermaculture is a membership-based wellness company offering contrast therapy, sauna, and recovery experiences across multiple physical locations in the U.S. As the business grew, Portal made a deliberate decision to move off an existing third-party booking platform and invest in a fully custom product that could better support its brand, operations, and long-term growth strategy.

I led product design across two major phases of this effort: an initial definition and discovery phase focused on the customer booking experience, followed by a platform expansion phase centered on admin tooling, operations, and reporting. Today, Portal is live in production, supporting hundreds of bookings per day across multiple locations, and has fully replaced the legacy systems it was built to supersede.

Background

Before Portal began building its own platform, the business relied on Glowfox, an off-the-shelf booking system that quickly became a limiting factor.

The team faced several issues:

• Frequent bugs and reliability problems
• A rigid system that couldn't support Portal's unique workflows
• A generic, dated customer experience
• Little ability to express Portal's brand, voice, or values
• Limited flexibility for future expansion

Beyond day-to-day frustrations, Glowfox also represented a strategic ceiling. Portal's long-term vision included white labeling and franchising, and it became clear that this would be nearly impossible on top of a closed, inflexible third-party platform.

Building a custom product wasn't just about improving UX. It was about owning the platform, unlocking flexibility, and creating a foundation the business could grow on for years.

Project Scope

Team & Role

Phase 1: Defining the Customer Experience

Context

Phase 1 was less about "redesigning a booking flow" and more about discovering what Portal's digital experience should be.

We were simultaneously:

• Replacing a legacy system
• Defining new business rules
• Establishing design patterns that would need to scale
• Iterating directly with a highly involved founding team

This meant design was deeply collaborative and highly iterative. Decisions were often made in tight feedback loops, refined, and pressure-tested against real operational needs.

Designing Through Discovery

The early booking experience needed to feel:

• Calm and approachable
• Clearly differentiated from generic fitness or booking apps
• Flexible enough to support memberships, credit packs, and one-off sessions
• Simple on the surface, without hiding important information

Rather than locking into rigid requirements, we treated early designs as working hypotheses. Flows were refined continuously as Portal learned what resonated with customers and what broke down in practice.

Crucially, this phase established foundational patterns and data models that made subsequent development phases possible. The flexibility of the admin platform, reporting, and scheduling systems all trace back to decisions made during this initial discovery phase.

Designing Within Portal's Brand

Portal has a modern, new-age aesthetic rooted in colorful geometric forms with a calm but confident tone. The brand intentionally avoids looking like traditional fitness software, which created a real opportunity to design something memorable and differentiated.

At the same time, this introduced tension:

• Very dark palettes risked poor contrast
• Warm reds and oranges sometimes read as error states
• Highly stylized UI elements occasionally competed with clarity

Part of my role was helping the team find the line. I regularly pushed back when design choices crossed into accessibility issues or introduced confusion, while still honoring the spirit of the brand. The result was a UI system that feels distinctly Portal, but remains usable, accessible, and clear under real-world conditions.

Phase 2: Scaling Into an Operational Platform

The Shift in Focus

As Portal expanded, the center of gravity moved from customer experience alone to the systems required to actually run the business.

Phase 2 introduced a different class of problems:

• Admin users with varying levels of technical comfort
• Increasing operational complexity across locations
• The need for insight without overwhelming users
• Replacing the legacy admin backend entirely

This phase was about turning Portal into a true operating platform, not just a booking interface.

Key Design Challenges & Decisions

Admin Tools Without Overwhelm

Admins needed power, but not complexity for its own sake.

I focused on:

• Clear defaults and progressive disclosure
• Scoping complex actions into side sheets and contained workflows
• Separating high-frequency actions from advanced configuration

The goal was to let admins move quickly for common tasks while still supporting deeper control when needed.

Session Scheduling as a System

Scheduling needed to support:

• One-time and recurring sessions
• Multiple session types
• Capacity, pricing, and audience rules
• Operational realities like staffing and availability

To incorporate these complex and variable requirements, scheduling was treated as a configurable system, borrowing familiar patterns from calendar tools while remaining flexible enough to grow as Portal's offerings evolved.

Reporting That People Can Actually Use

Reporting was one of the most complex areas of Phase 2.

Stakeholders wanted insight into:

• Membership trends
• Retention and cohorts
• Engagement and utilization
• Geographic distribution

At the same time, not every user needed every metric. Reports were organized by intent, with thoughtful defaults and filters to avoid overwhelming users or presenting misleading data. In several cases, simpler visualizations were chosen intentionally to balance accuracy, clarity, and development effort.

Outcomes & Impact

Portal is now live in production and fully replaces the previous booking and admin systems.

• The platform supports hundreds of bookings per day across multiple locations
• Admin workflows are faster, clearer, and more reliable
• Customer feedback on the booking experience has been consistently positive
• Staff and operators report greater confidence and control

Most importantly, Portal now owns its product experience end-to-end, rather than working around the limitations of third-party software.

Explore Portal and the experience I helped build on the live site here.