AviaTraffic

Overview

AviaTraffic is a regional airline whose website was quietly costing it trust: cluttered fare tables, ambiguous pricing, and forms that punished mistakes. In a focused two-week sprint I redesigned the core booking flow with one goal — make people feel confident about what they’re buying.

The problem

Booking a flight is a high-stakes purchase made under time pressure. Auditing the existing flow surfaced three trust-killers:

• Price ambiguity — the total changed late in the flow as fees appeared, the single biggest driver of abandonment.
• Dense fare tables — comparing fare classes required horizontal scrolling and a good memory.
• Punishing forms — validation fired only on submit, wiping progress on error.

Process

Two weeks doesn’t allow for lengthy research, so I ran a heuristic evaluation against Nielsen’s principles, benchmarked three airlines known for clear booking UX, and mapped the happy path plus its two most common failure paths. That map decided where the effort went: the fare selection step and the passenger details form.

The design

• Honest pricing, early — the full price with fees is visible from the first fare card; the total in the sticky summary never jumps.
• Fare cards instead of tables — each fare class became a scannable card with plain-language inclusions (“1 checked bag”, not “XB1”).
• Forgiving forms — inline validation, clear error recovery, and autosave so a mistake never costs progress.
• Accessibility as a feature — WCAG AA contrast, full keyboard navigation, and visible focus states throughout.

Outcome & reflection

The deliverable was a documented Figma file covering the end-to-end booking flow at desktop and mobile widths, with annotations for engineers. The constraint of two weeks was the real teacher here: a tight heuristic audit plus competitive benchmarking can locate 80% of the damage fast — you don’t always need a research phase to justify obvious repairs.