B2C · Retail · B2B · Travel · eCommerce
Online duty-free shopping platform for travellers
COMPANY
Inflyter
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
EXPERTISE
UX/UI Design
YEAR
2023
Read
6 mins
Project description
Inflyter is an online duty-free shopping platform built for travellers shopping ahead of their flight. As Lead Product Designer, I led design across iOS, Android, and Web for a global e-commerce platform spanning 10+ locations — from early research and design system foundations through to checkout, growing the platform end-to-end over nearly three years.
Challenge
The core UX problem was flight-based shopping: travellers needed a fast way to add their flight details in order to shop at all — a foundational piece of the platform's first version, under a tight delivery deadline. On top of that, the product needed a full logistics layer: enabling delivery to the gate or collection from a designated locker, and keeping travellers reliably informed as they moved through the airport.
Research
Research combined online surveys with in-person interviews. The pain point was consistent: long lines and confusing store layouts made duty-free shopping feel like a hassle, and the sheer range of products left travellers unsure what to buy. That shaped the direction — reducing friction and adding personalised recommendations, rather than just digitising the existing shop-floor experience. I benchmarked category-leading e-commerce platforms — Farfetch, John Lewis, Selfridges — alongside on-demand platforms like Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Uber, and pulled sales data directly from airport retailers to understand what actually sold.
Persona
The primary user was the business traveller: flying to multiple destinations on a tight schedule, with a higher budget and a willingness to pay for convenience. That profile pointed toward exclusive rewards, fast collection options, and flexible delivery — to the gate or to a designated locker — rather than a standard retail checkout.
Process
Discovery combined research findings with business requirements to shape the brief from day one. I ran a workshop with the tech team and stakeholders to align on scope and collect feedback on the raw user flow and initial wireframes before committing to a direction. Task management ran through Asana initially, moving to Jira as the team scaled.
User flow
The flow split around departure and arrival, and needed to work across multiple retailers within each — without navigation controls competing for attention with the product content itself. A specific complication came from Inflyter's US-based "3Sixty" offering: unlike the default pre-flight-only ordering model, 3Sixty supported home delivery, which meant users needed to change their delivery address mid-flow — something the rest of the product didn't require.
Design thinking
Not every decision came from a stated requirement. Onboarding wasn't part of the brief, but I pushed for a short illustrated opening sequence anyway — setting tone and surfacing key features before travellers got into the actual shopping flow. The departure/arrival navigation carried a similar trade-off: it had to stay fully actionable without pulling visual weight away from the retailer content it sat above.
A bigger problem emerged as the platform grew: early retailer integrations were each built as custom, one-off projects. Even within the same retail group, different airports needed different integration paths — sometimes resulting in multiple connectors for what was technically a single retailer. That wasn't sustainable, so I defined a standardised onboarding model — a consistent connector template with catalogue data syncing automatically rather than being rebuilt for every integration — so opening a new airport became a configuration task instead of a development project.
Implementation
Once the first phase was approved through stakeholder review, I moved from wireframes into a design system with core reusable elements, then into full interface design — all built in Figma, covering user flows, wireframes, the design system itself, and prototyping in one continuous workflow.
Standardising onboarding shifted the real design problem to what still needed to flex: local payment providers, regulatory differences, and retail teams that each worked differently. I defined how the platform absorbed that variation through configuration rather than custom code per case — the requirements and structure engineering built the connector architecture against.
Solution
Three principles anchored the interface: simplicity, functionality, and efficiency — chosen directly from research findings rather than as a generic design mantra. Simplicity meant the app needed to work for a traveller with zero duty-free experience, not just frequent flyers. Functionality was about which features earned their place: search, wishlist, and notifications were prioritised because research pointed to real friction points, not because they're standard e-commerce checkboxes.
Visual design
The core flow centred on a flexible flight-add mechanism — the entry point every other feature depended on — supported by search with suggestions, history, and auto-correction, a wishlist for saving items ahead of purchase, and notifications to keep travellers informed through the process. Validating travellers relied on scanning or importing a boarding pass, which doubled as the source for flight information and powered live, relevant notifications through the journey. Checkout supported multiple payment methods, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, alongside live order tracking.
For branded boutique sections, a fully branded Johnnie Walker boutique within the marketplace let customers explore collections and discover whiskies by flavour profile, learning about the brand before purchasing for airport collection — informational, brand-led browsing rather than a standard product grid. It set the template every later branded boutique followed, including an accordion menu with smooth transitions between sections.
Design system
The design system — components, colour, typography, and iconography — was built from the ground up to keep the product visually consistent as it scaled across iOS, Android, and Web.
Outcome
The platform's real achievement wasn't a single feature — it was proving the underlying architecture could scale. Standardising onboarding around a configurable connector model, instead of building bespoke integrations per airport, took years to mature, but it took the platform from a handful of pilot airports to 12+ live across 3 continents.
That same architecture proved it could travel beyond airports entirely. Duty-free applies at sea under the same tax exemptions, but cruise ships bring different constraints — intermittent satellite connectivity, catalogues tied to a specific voyage rather than a fixed location, pricing that shifts as the ship crosses borders. Partnering with Starboard Cruise Services, the same abstraction and configuration principles carried over, making the platform cruise-agnostic the way it had become retailer-agnostic for airports. That let the team deploy proofs of concept across 8 cruise lines in a short timeframe — confirmation the architecture generalised well beyond its original use case.
Reflection
The work reinforced how much design quality depends on process, not just output — usability testing, research, and clear team communication weren't separate from the design work, they're what made it hold up over time. Tracking data early enough to act on it, and using that data to make the case to stakeholders for why specific features mattered, shaped decisions throughout the project rather than only at the start.