Revamping the digital way to flight

Context & Role

As Head of UX/UI at Viva Aerobus, I led the complete transformation of the airline’s digital ecosystem, overseeing all aspects of user experience design across the web, mobile app, loyalty programs, memberships, and operational tools. My responsibilities spanned defining the design vision and strategy, leading multidisciplinary teams, aligning stakeholders, and laying the foundations for scalable, user-centered digital products.

The Challenge

The main challenge at Viva Aerobus was unifying fragmented digital experiences across multiple platforms while supporting the airline’s exponential growth. Customers interacted with the brand across various touchpoints, search, booking, check-in, loyalty, and airport operations, and each had different levels of maturity and technical constraints. The goal was to redesign the entire ecosystem to make it faster, more straightforward, and more intuitive, while ensuring business scalability and internal alignment. However, how can the design balance between business growth and user experience?

Research Phase & Discovery Workshops

We began with an extensive research phase combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies. This included user interviews, remote usability tests, data analysis from Google Analytics and Hotjar, heatmaps, customer surveys, and on-site airport observation. These insights enabled us to uncover booking frustrations, navigation issues, information gaps, and UX inconsistencies across devices. 

In parallel, I facilitated workshops with stakeholders from Product, Engineering, Commercial, Customer Service, IT, and Airport Operations. These sessions helped break silos, align internal priorities, and clarify business goals, enabling us to build a shared vision of what the new customer experience should look like.

Product design strategy

UX Strategy & Information Architecture

To build a strategy that truly aligned business needs with user experience, we conducted an extensive research phase that included customer interviews, usability studies, journey mapping, and behavioral data analysis. In parallel, I led a series of collaborative workshops with key stakeholders like Marketing, CRM, Operations, IT, Product, Commercial, and Cinema Operations, to uncover pain points, consolidate priorities, and define a shared vision for the digital ecosystem. These sessions allowed us to connect operational constraints with real user insights, ensuring that every decision was grounded in both feasibility and customer value. The result was a strategy that balanced operational feasibility, stakeholder alignment, and UX excellence, enabling Cinépolis to consolidate a global omnichannel ecosystem with consistent, scalable, and frictionless experiences across all digital and in-cinema touchpoints.

Mobile-First Approach & Flow Redesign

Because the majority of Viva Aerobus customers interact on mobile devices, we adopted a mobile-first approach and completely redesigned the core user flows, focusing on speed, clarity, and frictionless execution. This included simplifying the booking journey, optimizing understanding of fare bundles, improving ancillary visibility, and reducing the total number of steps required to complete a purchase.

A key objective of this phase was to significantly increase mobile transactions, both in volume and in monetary contribution. To achieve this, we strengthened the mobile checkout experience, improved performance on low-connectivity networks, and introduced UX patterns that promoted faster decision-making. We also optimized the mobile check-in flow and integrated biometric verification (Smile & Fly) to streamline the airport journey and encourage users to rely more heavily on the app.

These improvements were designed not only to enhance usability but also to drive measurable growth in mobile conversions, repeat usage, and overall digital revenue, making the app the primary and most efficient sales and service channel for the airline.

Development

Once the UX and UI foundations were fully defined, we initiated the development phase by aligning engineering teams on architecture, technical requirements, and component behaviors outlined in the design system. This kickoff ensured that frontend, backend, and mobile engineers shared a unified understanding of the product vision, interaction patterns, and delivery milestones.