Virgin App Feature

Project Title: “Find + Book a Tour”
My Role: Lead UX/UI Product Designer
Team: Product Manager, UX Researcher, UI Designer, Product Owner, Senior App Engineer, BA
Tools: Figma, Miro, Optimal Workshop, Slack, Zoom
Methodology: The Design Sprint 2.0 (by Jake Knapp)

Project Overview

The Virgin Australia mobile app allows customers to book flights, access trip details, and stay informed with relevant airport and travel information. During a recent strategic meeting, Virgin Australia executives identified an opportunity to expand the app’s capabilities by introducing a new “Find + Book a Tour” feature.

The goal was to allow users to browse, explore, and book curated local tours at their travel destinations - directly from the app. The experience needed to support personalised discovery based on destination, interest, and other relevant filters, while maintaining consistency with Virgin Australia's existing design system, brand guidelines, and user interface.

As part of a cross-functional Design Sprint team, we were tasked with rapidly ideating, prototyping, and testing a tour booking feature that would integrate seamlessly into the app’s main menu and overall customer journey.

Challenge

Designing a tour booking feature for the Virgin Australia app wasn’t just about adding new functionality - it was about doing so in a way that felt intentional, valuable, and intuitive within an existing ecosystem built primarily for flight bookings.

We had to introduce a new category of content (tours and experiences) into an app where users had different expectations and mental models. This meant carefully balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints, including:

Finding the right moment in the journey to surface tour recommendations without disrupting flight-related tasks.
Ensuring discoverability without cluttering the interface or overwhelming users.
Adhering to the existing design system, while expanding it to accommodate richer content like tour imagery, ratings, and dynamic filtering.
Validating whether users would trust Virgin Australia as a tour provider and see value in booking tours through the app, rather than third-party platforms.

This required a focused, time-boxed approach to ideation and testing - which is why we ran a full Design Sprint to rapidly explore, prototype, and validate the solution.

How might we...

How might we help users easily discover and book curated local tours within the Virgin Australia app—without overwhelming them or distracting from core booking journeys?

DESIGN SPRINT 2.0 PROCESS EXPLAINED

"Start at the end - define the long-term goal"

Day #1 - MONDAY

"Define the Challenge" - Morning sessions

Experts Interview + HMWs
Long-term Goals + Sprint Questions
Мар

"Produce Solution" - Afternoon sessions

Lightning Demos
4-Part Sketching
Note taking
Doodling
Crazy 8's
Concept

Day #2 - TUESDAY

"Vote on Solution" - Morning sessions

Tha Art Museum
Heat Map Vote
Solution Presentation
Straw Poll Vote
Decider Vote

"The Storyboard" - Afternoon sessions

User test flow
Storyboarding

Day #3 - WEDNESDAY

Prototyping - Whole day

prototyping ideas from yesterday and prepare them form user testing
Quite Room
Set Check-in Times
Discuss & Prioritise Storyboard Screens

Day #4 - THURSDAY

User Testing - Whole day

test different ideas and different tasks with participants
Interviewing
Taking Notes
Feedback Wall

Day 1 — Monday

We kicked off the Design Sprint by building a shared understanding of the problem space and aligning everyone around the core challenge. The focus was to unpack the opportunity, define long-term goals, and begin shaping possible directions—without jumping to solutions too early.

Morning session

Kick-off with Stakeholders

We started with a facilitated session that brought together key stakeholders from product, marketing, design, and engineering. This session clarified the why behind the sprint:

“As Virgin Australia looks toward its strategic goal of expanding functionality in the mobile app, we’ve chosen to run a Design Sprint as a focused, collaborative method to design and validate a new feature—in just five days. The sprint offers a way to rapidly test assumptions and gain user feedback before investing significant time and resources into development.”

We then revisited our current product mission and pinpointed the shift:

Current app goal: Help customers easily manage their trips—access bookings, check-ins, and boarding passes.

New opportunity: Empower users to book curated local tours directly through the app, enhancing their travel experience and positioning Virgin as a holistic travel companion.

This context helped everyone align on the importance of the challenge ahead and framed our work for the rest of the week.

“How Might We…”

Using the “How Might We” method, we turned challenges and user pain points into opportunity-framed questions. Everyone contributed sticky notes which we clustered and dot-voted to prioritise.

This exercise gave us a problem space rich with user-centred opportunities to explore.

Long-Term Goal

As part of our kickoff alignment, we asked the question:

“If everything goes smoothly, what would this product look like in two years?”

This exercise helped us set a clear, inspiring vision to guide our decisions throughout the sprint.

Primary Goal - Virgin Australia’s mobile app becomes the go-to platform for travellers looking to explore and book exciting destinations and experiences.

Secondary Goals - The app empowers users to independently plan and organise their own trips, including flights, accommodation, and local activities—all in one place.

Virgin Australia offers industry-leading tour and destination deals, becoming known for value, convenience, and a personalised travel experience.

By aligning on this long-term vision early, we ensured that all sprint activities—from ideation to prototyping—were contributing toward a clearly defined product direction with both business impact and user value.

Journey Mapping

We mapped the current Virgin Australia app flow from flight search to booking confirmation, highlighting user goals and app touchpoints along the way. This helped us locate high-potential moments where we could introduce the tour booking experience naturally—without adding friction. One strong candidate was the post-booking confirmation screen.

Afternoon sessions

Lightning Demos (Competitor Inspiration & Idea Harvesting)

To fuel creative thinking and gather inspiration, we ran a Lightning Demos session. Each participant researched and shared examples of how other apps solve similar problems and even non-travel platforms with great discovery flows.

We used a shared Miro whiteboard to upload screenshots and UI flows we liked. Each team member added:

App name and context
Highlighted UX patterns, UI elements, or interactions that stood out
A short note on why it was relevant to our tour booking feature

By the end of the session, the Miro board had become a visual library of ideas, filled with sticky notes, comments, and annotations. We discussed recurring patterns such as:

Visually rich tour cards with clear pricing and reviews
Location-based filtering and category tags
Seamless transitions from discovery to booking

This exercise helped us align on what "good" could look like, and sparked conversations around what could be adapted into Virgin’s own ecosystem and style.

Sketching Workshop: From Inspiration to Concepts

Building on the Lightning Demos, we moved into the 4-Part Sketching exercise to generate initial design concepts individually.

The process was structured to reduce groupthink and encourage original thinking:

Note-taking – Each team member reviewed the problem space and gathered key takeaways from the morning’s map, sprint questions, and inspiration examples.
Ideas/Doodling – Quick and loose visuals to begin exploring structure and interaction.
Crazy 8s – A fast-paced round where everyone sketched 8 variations in 8 minutes, forcing quantity and divergent thinking.
Solution Sketch – Each person created a detailed 3-panel storyboard of their strongest concept, focusing on UI layout, user flow, and content hierarchy.

These sketches were then prepared for discussion and voting on Day 2, setting the stage for collaborative decision-making around our first prototype.

Day 2 — Tuesday

After generating a wide range of ideas on Day 1, Day 2 was all about evaluating, prioritising, and choosing a directionfor prototyping. The goal was to select the most promising solution based on both user value and business viability, and prepare to bring that concept to life for testing later in the week.

As the Design Sprint facilitator, I led the team through a structured decision-making process using a series of workshops outlined in the Sprint methodology.

Morning session

The Art Museum (Silent Gallery Walk)

To start the day, I prepared all solution sketches from Day 1 and uploaded them into a shared Miro board, arranged clearly so each concept could be reviewed in isolation. This setup allowed us to step back and look at everyone’s ideas side-by-side, with equal weight and without premature judgment.

Each concept was treated like an exhibit in an art gallery — participants explored each sketch silently and independently, taking in the different ideas, layouts, and flows at their own pace.

Heat Maps (Dot Voting)

Team members then used virtual dot stickers to highlight specific ideas or components they found promising — whether a screen layout, navigation approach, content block, or interaction detail.

This phase created a heat map of interest, showing us which elements resonated most across the team.

Importantly, this was done without discussion, allowing each person’s opinion to be reflected independently of group influence.

Questions or uncertainties were written on digital sticky notes and placed directly under each concept — helping us identify areas that might need clarification or iteration later in the process.

Speed Critique

Once voting was complete, I facilitated a Speed Critique session where we reviewed each concept together. I presented each sketch one at a time, giving a brief, neutral summary and drawing attention to:

Areas with high vote concentration
Smart or unique interaction ideas
Questions raised by the team

While I facilitated the discussion, one participant was assigned to take notes and capture BIG ideas — standout moments, features, or patterns that could influence our final concept, even if they weren’t part of the winning sketch.

This session helped uncover shared patterns across concepts and provided a more holistic view of what could work well for users.

Straw Poll Voting

Next, each team member cast a “Straw Vote” — selecting the one concept (or hybrid idea) they believed should be prototyped. Everyone then briefly explained their reasoning, which surfaced alignment and divergence within the group.

This wasn’t a final decision, but it provided clarity on what ideas the team felt confident about — and helped prepare for the final vote.

The Super Vote (Final Decision by Decider)

Finally, the designated decider (a product owner) reviewed the team's input and selected the direction we would take forward.

Interestingly, the decider chose to combine two concepts:

One concept provided the core tour discovery and booking flow
Another offered a compelling filtering and recommendation interface based on user interests and destination

This hybrid approach ensured we were taking forward not just the most popular idea, but the most strategic one — blending the best of both user experience and business value.

Afternoon sessions

User Test Flow: Mapping the Experience to Be Tested

We began by asking:

“What is the most critical flow a user needs to complete to experience the value of this feature?”
Each team member independently sketched a 6-step user flow that represented how a user might engage with the new tour booking feature. We encouraged everyone to think in terms of screens or key moments, such as:

Entry point (e.g., after flight booking, or via main menu)
Browsing or discovery of tours
Filtering or selecting preferences
Tour detail view
Booking and confirmation
Integration with the existing itinerary

This exercise produced several different perspectives on the ideal user experience, helping surface assumptions and nuances that hadn’t yet been discussed.

Once the flows were shared, we used dot voting again to identify the most complete and promising version. The winning flow became the foundation for our prototype — ensuring we’d be testing the right moments and interactions with users.

Storyboarding: Aligning on the Screen-by-Screen Journey

With the winning flow selected, we moved into the Storyboarding session — the last major step of Day 2.

Using a whiteboard grid in Miro, we created a detailed screen-by-screen storyboard, where each frame represented one step in the user’s journey. This storyboard became our shared blueprint for the prototype build.

Key decisions during storyboarding included:

Where the experience begins:

We decided the first screen should appear immediately after flight booking, with a call-to-action something like “Enhance Your Trip” leading to tour options.
What the user sees while browsing: A curated list of tours, with visuals, pricing, reviews, and filters.
How information is structured: We mapped out a clean, scrollable Tour Detail screen with all necessary content to support confident booking.
The final confirmation moment: Clear booking summary, payment confirmation, and integration with the user’s existing travel plans in the app.

Outcome

By the end of the day, we had:

A tested and agreed-upon user flow to prototype
A detailed, collaborative storyboard that outlined the exact experience users would interact with
A shared vision of the narrative arc we wanted users to experience — from discovery to decision

This set us up for a fast and focused prototyping day, with no ambiguity about what needed to be built or tested.

Day 3 — Wednesday

With a clear storyboard and agreed user flow from Day 2, the third day of the Design Sprint was entirely focused on bringing the concept to life as a realistic, testable prototype. The goal was to simulate a working product well enough to elicit genuine feedback from users during the Day 4 testing sessions.

Goal for the Day

Build a high-fidelity prototypes that look and feel like a real product, using realistic content, Virgin Australia branding, and a clickable experience that mirrors the journey we storyboarded and tasks we want participants to test.

Tools Used

Figma – For UI design and interactive prototyping
Miro – For referencing the storyboard and flow
Slack & Zoom – For team coordination and async check-ins
Askable – For user recruitment and screening

Prototype Scope

To stay focused and meet our deadline, we prototyped the core “happy path” flow — the most important interactions that would allow us to validate the concept with real users:

Entry Point – “Enhance Your Trip” prompt shown after flight booking
Tour Discovery Screen – List of curated tours based on destination
Filter Options – Ability to narrow down tours by interest or category
Tour Detail View – Images, description, reviews, pricing, and availability
Booking Flow – Select date, confirm, and proceed to payment
Confirmation Screen – Booking summary with integration into trip itinerary

We intentionally left out complex edge cases or alternative flows (e.g., error states, login interruptions) to keep the experience focused and polished.

To stay focused and meet our deadline, we prototyped the core “happy path” flow — the most important interactions that would allow us to validate the concept with real users:

Entry Point – “Enhance Your Trip” prompt shown after flight booking
Tour Discovery Screen – List of curated tours based on destination
Filter Options – Ability to narrow down tours by interest or category
Tour Detail View – Images, description, reviews, pricing, and availability
Booking Flow – Select date, confirm, and proceed to payment
Confirmation Screen – Booking summary with integration into trip itinerary

We intentionally left out complex edge cases or alternative flows (e.g., error states, login interruptions) to keep the experience focused and polished.

Preparing for User Testing

In parallel with prototyping, we began preparing for Day 4’s moderated usability testing. To ensure we were testing the right things, we designed a set of key user journeys and tasks we wanted participants to accomplish — simulating realistic booking scenarios and evaluating feature discoverability, usability, and value.

Examples of test tasks included:

Discovering a relevant tour based on destination and interests
Applying filters to refine results
Viewing tour details to assess trust and appeal
Booking a tour and reviewing the confirmation

To recruit participants, we used the Askable platform, which allowed us to quickly screen and schedule 5 users who matched our target audience profile: frequent travellers, mobile-first, and familiar with booking experiences online.

We also:

Drafted a detailed test script with scenarios and prompts
Set up remote testing tools for screen sharing and observation
Conducted an internal dry run to ensure the prototype and testing flow were seamless

Interactive prototype

Day 4 — Thursday

On the final day of the Design Sprint, we put our prototype in front of real users to gather honest feedback, validate assumptions, and observe how they interacted with the new “Find + Book a Tour” feature.

The goal was to understand whether the concept resonated with users, where it delivered value, and where improvements were needed - before any development began.

Testing Format

We conducted six 1:1 remote testing sessions, each lasting approximately 30–45 minutes. All participants had been previously recruited through Askable and screened to match our target audience:

Frequent travellers (domestic or international)
Comfortable using mobile apps for travel planning
Open to booking experiences online

Each session was conducted via Zoom and recorded (with consent) for later review by the broader team.

We conducted six 1:1 remote testing sessions, each lasting approximately 30–45 minutes. All participants had been previously recruited through Askable and screened to match our target audience:

Frequent travellers (domestic or international)
Comfortable using mobile apps for travel planning
Open to booking experiences online

Each session was conducted via Zoom and recorded (with consent) for later review by the broader team.

Test Structure

Each session followed a semi-structured script focused on evaluating the end-to-end booking experience. The script included:

Intro & Warm-up – Understanding user habits and travel preferences
Scenario Introduction – "Imagine you’ve just booked a flight using the Virgin Australia app. What would you do next to prepare for your trip?”
Core Tasks (using the prototype):
- Find a tour that matches your interests
- Apply filters or browse categories
- Explore a tour detail and decide whether to book
- Complete the booking and view the confirmation
Follow-up Questions – What felt easy or confusing? Would you trust this service? What would you expect to happen next?

Each session followed a semi-structured script focused on evaluating the end-to-end booking experience. The script included:

Intro & Warm-up – Understanding user habits and travel preferences
Scenario Introduction – "Imagine you’ve just booked a flight using the Virgin Australia app. What would you do next to prepare for your trip?”
Core Tasks (using the prototype):
- Find a tour that matches your interests
- Apply filters or browse categories
- Explore a tour detail and decide whether to book
- Complete the booking and view the confirmation
Follow-up Questions – What felt easy or confusing? Would you trust this service? What would you expect to happen next?

Key Journeys Observed

We focused on testing the key flows defined on Day 3, including:

Tour discovery after flight booking
Browsing and filtering options
Tour detail content and booking clarity
Confirmation screen and itinerary integration

These flows allowed us to evaluate whether the feature felt useful, trustworthy, and seamlessly integrated into the existing app experience.

We focused on testing the key flows defined on Day 3, including:

Tour discovery after flight booking
Browsing and filtering options
Tour detail content and booking clarity
Confirmation screen and itinerary integration

These flows allowed us to evaluate whether the feature felt useful, trustworthy, and seamlessly integrated into the existing app experience.

What We Learned

Throughout the sessions, we observed consistent patterns—both positive reactions and friction points. Some key takeaways included:

What Worked Well

Users appreciated being offered tour options immediately after booking a flight — it felt contextual and helpful
The layout and visual hierarchy on the Tour Detail page built trust (especially through use of images, reviews, and clear pricing)
Users liked the ability to filter by interest, saying it made the experience feel personalised and efficient

What Needed Improvement

A few users hesitated at the booking stage, unsure whether payment was going through Virgin Australia or a third-party provider — suggesting a need to clarify trust and ownership
Some wanted to compare multiple tours, highlighting a future need for saving or shortlisting options
The “Enhance Your Trip” entry point was missed by one user, prompting us to consider better visual emphasis or onboarding

Final Day — Synthesis & Wrap-Up

Although user testing sessions were completed on Day 4, we dedicated the final working day of the sprint to fully digesting what we had learned and converting those insights into clear next steps for the product team.

Debrief & Insight Synthesis

We began the day by reviewing recordings and notes from all five user sessions. As a team, we:

Clustered key observations using virtual sticky notes in Miro
Identified recurring patterns, standout quotes, and moments of friction
Organised feedback by flow step (e.g., entry point, discovery, booking, confirmation)
Distinguished between critical usability issues, minor tweaks, and future enhancements

Our goal was to create a clear, prioritised summary of findings that stakeholders could act on immediately.

Deliverables Created

By the end of the day, we had prepared and shared a Sprint Findings Pack, which included:

A concise insights report summarising user behaviours, needs, and barriers
Screenshots of the prototype annotated with feedback
Top recommended improvements to explore in the next iteration
A quick confidence rating for each flow step based on user reactions
Discussion of open questions or assumptions still needing validation

We also hosted a wrap-up session with stakeholders, walking them through the results, validating next steps, and recommending how we could move forward with refinement and testing.

Final Reflections

The Design Sprint allowed us to rapidly test a bold new idea with real users, without committing months of design and engineering effort. We left the week with:

A validated concept that adds user and business value
Tangible user feedback that would have been costly to uncover post-launch
A strong foundation for the next phase of design and product planning

Thank you for your time!

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