Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia

In-flight entertainment

I collaborated with Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Australia, and Mezzo Global, specialists in travel technology and in-flight entertainment systems—on this project. The brief was to redesign the UI of Mezzo's in-flight entertainment (IFE) application for both airlines, ensuring it aligned closely with Virgin's established brand guidelines. The goal was to create a cohesive and premium visual experience by developing UI elements that reflected Virgin's distinctive look and feel, while also supporting usability within a constrained in-flight environment. The final designs were implemented on custom Samsung tablets used by business-class passengers to browse and enjoy premium media content.

The in-flight entertainment experience is a complex product environment with multiple constraints including screen size, navigation limitations, and strict brand guidelines, for example Virgin Australia branding is in lowercase, whereas Virgin Atlantic uses uppercase and sentence case.

The core challenge was balancing usability with a premium, on-brand visual experience. Users interact with this system in a very specific context, often passively, sometimes distracted, so clarity and ease of navigation were critical.

I started by mapping out key user journeys and identifying friction points in navigation and content discovery. From there, I explored multiple layout directions to improve hierarchy and make content easier to scan and engage with.

A key part of the work was thinking in systems rather than individual screens. I defined consistent patterns for navigation, content cards, and interaction states to ensure the experience felt cohesive across the product. This also helped create a foundation that could scale as new content or features were introduced.

Visually, I focused on typography, spacing, and contrast to create a clean and legible interface that still felt aligned with the Virgin brand. Given the environment, accessibility and readability were especially important, for example, ensuring sufficient contrast and clear information hierarchy.

I worked closely with the engineering team to ensure the designs were feasible within technical constraints, and adapted designs where necessary to balance intent with implementation realities.