Work TUI New Navigation

TUI – New Navigation

Summary

As part of TUI Group’s transformation from a traditional package holiday provider to a “Global Curated Leisure Marketplace”, the business aimed to accelerate growth and profitability by expanding its product range. This shift required a fundamental redesign of the app experience to support new product types, improve discoverability, navigation, and align with evolving business goals. The project was highly strategic and initiated at the request of TUI’s CEO.

The challenge

The design team was tasked with reimagining the core navigation and home screen of the TUI app to support the company’s expanding product range and evolving business model. The existing experience was too narrowly focused on traditional Package holidays and needed to scale to accommodate a broader, more diverse leisure offering.  We were given a directive to bring ‘search’ to the forefront of the experience – without compromising the visibility or performance of the merchandising campaigns.

The home screen

As with any app, the home screen serves as the most valuable piece of digital real estate – it’s the user’s entry point, a brand showcase, and a critical driver of engagement and conversion. For TUI, the challenge was even more nuanced: the home screen needed to balance multiple strategic priorities.

We had to create space for both exploratory search and discovery-led browsing, allowing users to easily plan trips across a much wider product range – including hotels, experiences, cruises, and more. At the same time, we needed to ensure prominent visibility for merchandising campaigns, which are key commercial levers for the business.

Identifying key problems

1. Product selector not scalable for TUI’s strategic goal to become a marketplace. 
2. Merchandising campaigns and promotions in a feed are jumbled with service messaging.
3. Service messaging lost within promo content.
4. Intro text mainly static, not well personalised and does not earn its space.
5. Merchandising cards were considered visually inconsistent, low-impact, and uninspiring.

Articulated design decisions

Given the strategic nature of the project, it was essential to present work in a way that resonated with senior stakeholders. This required crafting clear, compelling narratives that articulated design decisions effectively.

The solution

We redesigned the home screen to be more scalable, intuitive, and aligned with TUI’s evolving business model. The new structure introduces a ‘Product Selector’ at the top clear entry points for key product categories – allowing users to easily discover a wider range of leisure offerings beyond traditional package holidays.   Search was given greater prominence without compromising merchandising priorities, striking a balance between exploration and commercial intent.

Promotion cards

As part of the home screen redesign, we revisited the promotional cards – which had become visually inconsistent, low-impact, and uninspiring. Our goal was to create a more cohesive, visually engaging format that clearly communicated value while supporting a wider variety of content types, including third-party offers and inspirational content.

Empowering teams with scalable guidelines

To ensure the experience could scale and remain effective beyond launch, we created a set of design guidelines specifically for merchandising teams. These guidelines outlined best practices for campaign placement, content formatting, and visual consistency within the new home screen layout.

The goal was to strike a balance between commercial flexibility and design integrity – enabling teams to promote offers and seasonal content without compromising usability or cluttering the interface. By providing clear principles and reusable components, we empowered non-design stakeholders to contribute confidently while maintaining a coherent, high-quality experience.