The airlines' new online home is responsive and features a single screen. It also books people twice as fast as normal sites.

California-based airline Virgin America worked with design studio startup Work & Co. to reinvent the airline’s website, particularly their online booking system.

The airline wanted to change up their website user experience, especially on mobile devices, to make it easier and more convenient for their customers to book flights with them online. Booking flights using smartphones can be a tricky process since most of the websites are not configured to be mobile-friendly and it can be difficult to navigate through them on mobile devices. One of the airline’s main goals for the website redesign was to increase the number of booking transactions on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

For eight months, Work & Co. collaborated with Virgin America’s IT, Creative, Marketing, and Customer Service groups to create a new online experience for Virgin America’s customers. Virgin and Work & Co. went with a responsive and stripped down website, removing all the usual vacation ads, credit card promos, and car rental offers. The redesigned website allowed customers to book flights nearly twice as fast on any type of device.

The team did away with the typical multi-page flow and created a single screen design that follows the mental path of the user. Visitors to the website can now view the site as a full screen with single scroll booking. The new booking system lets users focus on one key step at a time. The user first selects their departure city and destination, followed by the number of passengers, and then the dates of travel. The user is then taken to the list of available flights with the corresponding rates. After that, users can opt to select their preferred seats or skip that part to fill out the passenger details and proceed to payment. If the user changes their mind about any of the steps prior to paying, they can simply scroll back up to the previous step.

Since the site is responsive, it fits any screen, whether it’s a laptop, tablet or smartphone. Aside from the clean and easy flow, the new site also features fun avatars, cool colors, and a cheeky sense of humor.

In a press release, Luanne Calvert, Virgin America’s CMO, said,

Our new website, like our plane cabins and most other aspects of the Virgin America experience, was created by listening to what travelers liked and didn’t like. The goal of the redesign was to better reflect their needs and how people book and manage travel today.

The website also allows web check-in and passengers can choose to print out their boarding pass, which also has a redesigned version that fits a single letter-sized sheet of paper and folds into a square that fits easily into one’s back pocket.

Take a tour of the new Virgin America website via this link.

Virgin America

[h/t] Wired