These are so much fun and soo helpful. Thanks for making these, Samuel.

This is the most fun I have had all morning. Thanks Samuel!

Very nice, good example of a heuristic analysis. The only thing I have to disagree with is the window vs aisle seat. Saying window seat is a no-brainer is totally not true, lots of people prefer aisle seats. Although, I'm glad that middle seat wasn't an option, that I think is safe to assume no one (flying alone) would prefer a middle seat.

How long does it take you to do the tear downs? What is your process for your reviews? Where do you think the best place to educate yourself regarding on boarding is? To me, your site gets me thinking, but where do you turn to?

I always enjoy your teardowns, they're always fascinating and well made!

Hey Samuel!

Thanks for taking the time to do the whole teardown. I was a part of the team who worked on this and it's always cool to see how other people react to your work. Here's some behind the scenes on our design decisions:

• The primary audience for this app are frequent Virgin flyers and Elevate (rewards program) members. This is important, because it helped guide a bunch of our decisions both in terms of content and design.
• We don't include any introductory copy about the app because most people who download it already have an Elevate account or have booked with Virgin before, giving them a specific use case. Thus, we just want to get out of the way of the user as much as possible.
• In terms of the Join Elevate section, I agree with you that it could use some more supporting content in places. I'll pass your feedback along.
• We're asking for your preferences in seating because it opens up the path for us to just give you the best possible seat without having to go through a seat map first, further speeding up booking. That's a feature we've been talking about in design, but if I recall correctly, it's not yet in there.
• When we ask for your go-to city, it's not your home town, but the place you travel to most. There are a lot of business travelers who routinely take the same route (and are part of our core audience for the app). Having this info allows us to surface a quick entry to booking that route right from the home screen when it's appropriate.

Let me know if you (or anyone else) have more questions, I'll be happy to answer them!

They sure did!