The pass in reading order
The route first, in the biggest type on the pass, then the name and the seat, then the gate and the boarding time.
Virgin Airlines
During my time at Virgin Australia, I had the opportunity to work across a range of exciting customer-facing products. One of the most impactful was the redesign of the digital boarding pass experience, improving clarity, accessibility, and usability for a product used by more than 3 million passengers each year.
- Company
- Virgin Australia
- Type
- Digital boarding pass
- Passengers
- 3M+ a year
The digital boarding pass was one of the products I worked on at Virgin Australia. What follows is how the pass is laid out, and why it reads the way it does.
A boarding pass carries a lot for one screen. This one has the date and the flight number, the route and its times, the passenger’s name and seat, a code to scan, and the gate, the cabin, the booking reference, the boarding time, the terminal and the Velocity tier. It reads from the top, and each part answers a question in turn: is this my flight, is this me and where do I sit, and where and when do I board.
The route answers the first. PER and BNE are the biggest type on the pass, each with its city above it and a time below, and a line runs from one to the other with a plane at its middle. The date and the flight number sit in the corners above. Below them the white card begins, with the name and the seat at its top. Under a dashed line the rest of the details sit in two columns, starting with the gate and the boarding time.
Every detail is a small label over a bold value: Seat over 8A, Gate over 35, Boarding over 14:25. The labels are there for the first read and quiet after it, so the eye can run down the values on their own.
The code sits beside the name and the seat, about as tall as the two of them together. Under it are three words: Tap to enlarge. They weren’t in the first design. They came from testing the pass for real, at airports around Australia.
Airports don’t all scan with the same equipment. Some of it is newer and some older, and with some of it the way light reflected off a phone meant the code wouldn’t always scan. It happened at one airport in Perth, and that was enough: the design had to account for it. Tap to enlarge was the fix. The code stays small while the pass is being read, and grows when it’s time to scan.
Tap to enlarge
The fix that came out of testing at airports: the code beside the name and the seat grows when it’s time to scan.
The pass comes in six colours, and they’re all the same pass, for the same passenger on the same flight. What changes from one to the next is the colour and the Velocity tier, printed near the foot of the white card, and the two go together: the red pass says Red, the grey one Silver, the bronze one Gold, the charcoal one Platinum and the navy one Beyond. The sixth, in purple, has no tier on it at all.
2 of 6
Velocity tier
Nothing else changes. Whatever the colour, the type on it is white, and the white card is the same on every pass, so the name, the seat, the code and the details always sit dark on white, in the same places. Switch between them and only the colour and one word move.
On a phone the pass fills the screen, and at its foot is the one other thing to do with it: Add to Apple Wallet.
Below is the pass in a hand.