A ground-up redesign of the flight booking experience, turning an anxious, cluttered transaction into something that feels like the beginning of a trip, not the administrative cost of going on one.
Flight booking apps were transactional, not experiential. Users felt anxiety, not excitement. Cluttered search results, hidden fees revealed only at checkout, and cryptic date pickers made every booking feel like solving a puzzle, not the beginning of an adventure.
The emotional gap between "I want to travel" and "I've booked my flight" was enormous. Every app in the market optimized for data density over delight.
The systemic problems preventing users from completing bookings with confidence.
| Feature | MakeMyTrip | Cleartrip | Ixigo | TripBits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price Transparency | ~ | ~ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Smart Search & Ranking | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ |
| Loyalty Integration | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Family Booking Flow | ~ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Emotional / Destination UX | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Price Alerts | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ |
Understanding who we design for, their motivations, goals, and pain points.
Amber gold anchors the brand, energetic, warm, aspirational. Sky blue provides cool relief and signals trust on pricing and confirmation states.
All transitions use cubic-bezier(0.16,1,0.3,1)
for a spring-like feel that rewards every tap.
4pt base grid. Mobile-first components built for thumb reach. Key actions sit in the bottom 40% of the screen.
Three decisions redefined what a flight booking app could feel like. Each one required choosing against the OTA industry default, and justifying that choice with user behavior data.
Every screen designed to carry the emotional charge of a journey about to begin.
TripBits, Mobile Travel Planning Interface
TripBits, Booking Confirmation & Rewards
The tools and methods used throughout the design process.
The process for TripBits was grounded in a straightforward observation: when something goes wrong mid-booking. A price change, a confusing seat map, an unclear baggage policy, people don't just abandon the flow. They abandon the platform. The research shaped the brief. What follows is an honest account of how that understanding drove every design decision.
150 in-depth interviews across frequent and occasional travellers. Identified anxiety triggers, delight moments, and emotional peaks in the existing booking journey.
Plotted emotional valence across the entire booking funnel. Found the exact moments where excitement turned to frustration, the fee reveal, the date picker, the seat map.
Collapsed the 12-step legacy flow into 3 milestone-based steps. Transparent pricing from step one eliminated the dreaded checkout surprise.
Built a component library purpose-built for travel booking: destination cards, smart search, flexible date intelligence, gamified reward chips, and motion transitions.
Tested 3 rounds of high-fidelity prototypes with 40 participants. Each round refined the emotional tone, micro-interaction timing, and pricing transparency cues.
Validated through usability testing, A/B prototyping, and post-launch analytics across a cohort of 500+ test users.
TripBits was the clearest lesson I've had in how emotional design is not an aesthetic layer, it's structural. The way a screen feels determines whether the user continues or exits, far more than the information it contains.
"The most important screen in TripBits isn't the search results or the payment page. It's the confirmation. We spent more time on the post-booking confirmation than on almost any other state, because that's the moment the user stops being a customer and starts being a traveller. Getting that transition right, making it feel celebratory rather than administrative, was the clearest articulation of what we were building."
, Rupesh Chavan, Lead Product Designer