Avanti West Coast
Designing a unified digital experience for rail customers
- Client
- Avanti West Coast
- Category
- Rail
- Year
- 2024–2025
Project Overview
Avanti West Coast asked us to bring consistency and clarity to a complex digital ecosystem spanning loyalty, booking, customer comms and the wider brand experience. Across web, app and email, fragmented patterns and legacy constraints were creating friction for customers and inefficiency for the business.
Over several years, we partnered with Avanti to modernise key journeys, establish a scalable design system and elevate the experience for millions of passengers. The work delivered measurable improvements across loyalty, booking, customer portals, web content and service communications. By applying the same principles of clarity, accessibility and performance across every touchpoint, the experience became more joined-up and far easier to maintain. It also strengthened collaboration between internal teams, suppliers and developers, creating a reliable foundation for future digital evolution.
Bringing clarity to complex journeys
Rail journeys are full of decision points, comparisons and trade-offs. Our work focused on removing friction while preserving the honesty and clarity customers need. Working closely with internal stakeholders and developers, we redesigned booking flows to make choices easier, reduce cognitive load and create a more predictable user experience.
We introduced clearer hierarchy, simplified options and patterns that support speed and understanding. This reshaped some of the most business-critical journeys and became a benchmark for future work across teams.
Corporate Website redesign
We helped rework Avanti’s corporate website by simplifying the structure, reducing content and creating reusable modules that brought clarity and consistency. The result is a cleaner, more accessible site that’s easier for teams to maintain, reflects stakeholder needs as well as customer needs and is aligned with the wider digital system.
Improving loyalty and customer communications
We redesigned Avanti’s loyalty experience to make tier progress, rewards and benefits easy to understand. The structure, language and visual presentation all shifted to support clarity and customer confidence. We also worked across their email and notification ecosystem to bring consistency in tone, hierarchy and accessibility, aligning communications with the wider product experience.
A scalable design system for real-world delivery
Avanti needed a digital system that could be used consistently across multiple suppliers and internal teams. We translated the refreshed brand into a robust design system, defining components, tokens and accessibility standards that would hold up across web and app.
Booking flow redesign: a polished product in record time
Avanti needed a booking flow that could handle the full complexity of UK rail ticketing: SISJ compliance, multi-leg journeys, mixed ticket types, and a seamless experience across web and app, all on a very tight timeline. We mapped every ticketing scenario, ran rapid strategy workshops to align stakeholders, and tested two design approaches with real travellers using high-fidelity prototypes with live pricing logic. As always, we insisted on research, and it paid off: participants breezed through even the most complex bookings, citing clearer comparison and simpler descriptions. We then worked hand-in-hand with the dev team to bring the new flow to millions of UK rail travellers.
The results
growth in disabled persons railcard usage — the journey opened up to people it had underserved.
growth in senior railcard usage across the combined web data.
more likely that desktop users engage with ticket information than before.
conversion uplift in the app — 16% on desktop, 5% on mobile web.
higher average transaction value on desktop, and 2% on both mobile web and app.
since launch to deliver measurable gains across every platform.
In their words
“Working with Aleks has been an absolute pleasure. Her deep knowledge of the rail industry, combined with her proactive and personable approach, makes her a standout partner. She brings an incredible level of detail to every project, ensuring nothing is overlooked and delivering exceptional results.”
“We've worked with Aleks closely over the last 2 years across a number of brilliantly delivered projects from the loyalty portal and stakeholder pages to the booking flow. Aleks has a strong understanding of our domain and great delivery capabilities. We can constantly rely on her and her team.”
