Redesigning how a nation books its flights

A national airline commissioned the redesign of its digital ecosystem and identity: everything from landing on the website to booking, managing a trip and using the loyalty programme, on desktop, mobile and app.

For many visitors the airline’s website is their first contact with the country. According to the brief, foreign visitors have more than tripled in 20 years, to around 3 million a year, with 4 million expected by 2028. They arrive from regions that read in different alphabets, so the design had to hold up in more than one script.

The plan was 18 weeks in three phases: research and architecture, redesign, and testing.

I joined as a freelance senior UX designer in a team spread over two agencies. The information architecture and the design system, with its documentation, were mine. The benchmark, the wireframes and the visual design I shared with other designers.

The work, in order:

1. 01BenchmarkEight airlines over the same six flows, buying real tickets to see the whole process.
2. 02Focus groupsFour groups run by the client’s own staff: two on booking and two on loyalty.
3. 03AuditThe existing navigation, split into eight blocks.
4. 04ArchitectureA proposal justified point by point, and two rounds of review.
5. 05Wireframes and UIFive flows with 192 UX annotations, then visual design with the rest of the team.
6. 06Design systemComponents, documentation and a final audit of the delivery.

And the decisions that shaped it:

• Booking and managing a trip get a menu each

  “Plan your trip” mixed three moments: before booking, booking and after booking. Someone who needed to check in right now had to open a menu about planning. All eight airlines in the benchmark separate the two, and none uses “Plan” as its booking label. Keeping one menu and only renaming it was the cheap option; I split it into “Book & Plan” and “My trip”, with check-in, flight status and baggage in plain sight.

• No “Information” menu: content goes where the task happens

  A label that fits everything helps nobody find anything, and no airline in the benchmark had one. Instead of tidying its 13 items, I dissolved the menu: fare rules and price hold went next to booking, baggage next to the trip, support into help, and cargo and policies down to the footer. Company content left the header too, which freed room to promote the country as a destination, as every flag carrier in the benchmark does.

• The same navigation before and after login

  Logging in dropped users into a loyalty portal with its own sidebar, a hamburger hiding the public menu and booking actions competing with both. In the focus groups one user could not tell which screen they were on. I kept the main navigation unchanged after login and gathered the private area in one place with three parts: miles, bookings and profile.

• A component only if it repeats across three screens

  The brief gave the design system one line inside a nine-week phase that also held every screen. Once it started I was asked to turn whole pages into components, which nobody would ever reuse. The rule we settled on: if something repeats in three different screens of a flow, it becomes a component; in one or two, text styles and spacing tokens do the job. Seat selection passed the test: one seat component with its types and states, inside a larger cabin.

Not everything survived the reviews. We recommended a plainer name for the private area, the client insisted on its own label, and we gave way. The architecture held because the argument was never my taste against theirs: each change sat next to its problem, the benchmark and what users had said.

It is the method I will reuse: compare the same flows across competitors, break the problems into blocks and tie every proposal to its evidence. What I cannot claim yet is that passengers are better off. The usability testing planned as the last phase stayed with the client, and the new site has not launched.