OUIGO
New market, new customers
OUIGO Spain aimed to broaden its market reach by addressing the needs of business travelers, SMEs, and premium leisure customers, who expect greater flexibility and customization, without sacrificing its main target: the group travelers looking for cheap price.
Discovery discipline method
Apply a discovery process
It helps to secure what we want to push and align the stakeholders while minimizing negative impacts.
7 steps, 7 deliverables
The F.O.C.U.S.E.D. framework represent the whole exploration process to make an effective discovery.
Each step is following by a deliverable to summarize what we’ve done.
A tool for PM
Designed for product managers, it emphasizes a strategic mindset over pure UX practice.
Its simplicity makes it easy to understand and apply, focusing on product strategy rather than design execution.
Framework's steps
Project Ambition workshop
This activity outline success indicators, potential risks, and the time we could realistically dedicate for the project.
Goal: eliminate secondary concerns and ensure everyone shared the same vision from the start.
Key outcome
Their priority was straightforward: minimize friction all along the project and deploy quickly. While the agreements were only partial, they provided enough direction to set expectations and structure the upcoming stages within the tight schedule.
Proto-persona workshop
With a restrained schedule and limited resources, I chose to anchor the workshop around proto-personas instead of qualitative interviews, or observational studies.
Yet, that approach was pragmatic because it allowed us to have a starting point while highlighting patterns, and map potential use cases without delaying the process.
It created a shared foundation that the team could build on in subsequent stages of the redesign.
Personas scaled in 7 steps
Key outcomes
All of those audiences have got their own interest like the price of the reservations, the comfort provided by the options, and the brand universe.
4 distinct targets audience
Group travelers
Friends and families who enjoy sharing experiences and travel mostly during holidays or week-end sometimes.
Working travelers
Freelance worker and business persons, working during the travel in good conditions.
Opportunity hunter
Customers whom doesn’t pay attention of the brand effort but the price.
Recurrent travelers
Travelers who take the train regularly to go work or return to their family for students case.
Key insight
The attribute’s spectrum offers several layers of reading, which is vital to take strategic decisions further.
Launch tweet workshop
This workshop is a simple yet powerful activity where the team had to summarize the new offering in under 280 characters. The brevity forced focus, pushing the group to distill the essence of the redesign into a single, compelling message.
Goal: anchored the team and redact an early marketing pitch that stakeholders could rally around.
A nice look & feel to visualize the result of their effort !
Final result
Group travelers target
Working travelers target
Outcomes
Because the main objective was light and already known since the brief, the impact on this deliverable was minor. Also, because I was in charge of the mockups, the most important was for me to clearly identify the top priorities of the customers. Those priorities were to show price range for group traveler, and have a clear list of the options for the business persons.
User journey workshop
While this step can easily expand too broadly, we narrowed it to two key journeys:
pre-sales & after-sales.
To support this work, I introduced a new deliverable for the company: user journeys. Though incomplete due to limited user data, they provided a first visual framework to spot opportunities and guide design.
We selected two proto-personas, working travelers and group travelers, and I split stakeholders into teams to map each persona’s ticket-purchase journey. Afterward, both groups reviewed and enriched each other’s work through open discussion.
A nice look & feel deliverable always help the stakeholders to see the result of their effort !
The real value of this workshop emerged during the impact identification exercise. Step by step, we mapped where the new offering would affect the user journey, creating the workshop’s true deliverable: a clear, actionable view of where design interventions were needed, without the burden of unnecessary documentation.
Outcomes
One key finding was the challenge of fitting a third offer into the existing layout. To address this, we designed an additional page between time selection and options, providing both space efficiency and a clearer overview of what each offer included. Other impacts were tied to content consistency, such as how offers would display at payment and post-purchase stages, and to adjustments in push marketing placements.
Benchmark workshop
This step followed the principle of a benchmark, exploring both direct competitors and inspiring solutions from other industries. Looking beyond the company’s market was key, as standout patterns often come from companies that have turned them into strengths, like Airbnb’s branding or Spotify’s annual reviews.
The activity focused on analyzing how competitors display prices, while also drawing from adjacent sectors such as telecoms and low-cost airlines, which similarly rely on tiered pricing models. This exercise highlighted strengths and weaknesses across different approaches, helping us define a clear path forward.
A nice look & feel deliverable always help the stakeholders to see the result of their effort !
Ultimately, the benchmark guided us to a simple rule: avoid overloading offers with optional content. Instead, each offer should emphasize three essentials: the name, the price, and the included options. This minimum requirement ensured clarity without sacrificing value.
Quick actionable prototypes
The next step was to translate all the upstream work into mockups and prototypes. Guided by our proto-personas, the design needed to emphasize price clarity for Group Travelers while offering clear visibility of premium options for Working Travelers, who value comfort and productivity on the move.
Adopting a mobile-first approach, I proposed a tabbed navigation system for quick offer comparisons without endless scrolling. This solution gave Working Travelers a clear overview while making it easier for Group Travelers to spot the most affordable option.
This first draft using tabs was already highly appreciated, but early feedback revealed a flaw: users who started with the lowest offer couldn’t easily see what higher tiers included. To address this, I expanded the cards and harmonized the layouts across offers. While this strategy highlighted upsell opportunities, it also increased cognitive load, something to monitor closely through user testing and analytics.
To support these changes, I removed swiping interactions in favor of a full-width content, integrated pricing directly into the offer titles, and optimized space by embedding the tabs inside the cards.
Beyond pre-sales, I also worked on the after-sales flow, ensuring the new offers were clearly visible in booking summaries. The most challenging task, however, was restoring and translating components under extreme time pressure: in just 3–4 days, I rebuilt ~50 website and app screens of the 2 flows, ensuring consistency and readiness for the Spanish team and developers.
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The final step of this process is normally dedicated to testing the prototype with the target audience. This validation phase determines if the solution truly meets user needs or requires further refinement. It is also the moment, particularly within a discovery mindset, to decide if the investment is worth moving into production. While this decision is never easy (anchoring bias often makes it psychologically difficult to put aside previous efforts), it is critical to think about it. Launching a product that does not align with market needs risks wasted resources and declining performance metrics.
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In the case of OUIGO Spain, however, this step was largely theoretical. Regardless of readiness, the company was committed to launching in Spain to support its growth strategy. Budget constraints prevented user testing with Spanish customers, meaning this phase served less as a validation exercise and more as a confidence check on the work completed.
My feedback on this method
Applying this method was a highly insightful experience. By combining the Double Diamond and Design Sprint approaches, it provides a versatile and manageable framework. While the seven steps may seem daunting at first, they are complementary and guide a project from initial discovery to concrete outcomes.
The clearest advantage of this methodology lies in its deliverables, which help anchor stakeholders’ perspectives and reduce mid-project reversals, a common challenge in business. The term “Discovery Discipline” is well thought: it brings rigor and a structured framework to companies eager to explore, offering both flexibility for adaptation and tangible value even on a first project.
For the OUIGO implementation, practical challenges such as budget limitations, partial discovery applicability, and my first hands-on use, made the process somewhat complex. Nevertheless, it successfully introduced product owners and managers to a new, structured approach, demonstrating its value beyond immediate outputs. Collaborating with the OUIGO Squirrel team was particularly rewarding; being trusted for my expertise and sharing it collaboratively made the experience even more fulfilling.
