The Challenge

Designing for an aircraft is different from designing for a typical digital product. The experience needs to be immediately understandable, work across a wide range of passengers and use cases, and operate within a highly constrained technical environment.

At the same time, RAVE’s Open Platform needed to demonstrate its flexibility. The GUI couldn’t be designed as a one-off experience for a single airline. It needed to establish a flexible foundation that could adapt to different brands, content, and passenger experiences.

How might we create a modern, passenger-first IFE experience that is both engaging for travelers and flexible enough to work across RAVE’s ecosystem?

The Experience

With the foundation established, we translated the principles into a cohesive passenger experience across the RAVE Next Generation GUI.

The interface was designed around two complementary parts of the passenger journey: understanding the journey and enjoying it. The live map provides a sense of place and progress, while entertainment and utility features remain easily accessible throughout the experience.

Rather than treating each screen as an isolated interface, we designed a connected system where navigation, content discovery, and flight information work together throughout the passenger journey.

01. A Homescreen Built Around the Journey

This creates a balance between journey awareness and entertainment discovery: passengers can see where they are, understand their progress, and jump directly into something to watch or listen to.

02. Familiar Entertainment Discovery

For entertainment discovery, we drew inspiration from familiar OTT platforms such as Netflix, using a rail-based browsing system to make a large content library feel intuitive and easy to explore.

Content is organized into horizontal rails based on categories, recommendations, and curated selections, allowing passengers to quickly scan what is available and dive deeper into content that interests them.

By applying interaction patterns passengers already recognize from streaming services, we aimed to make the transition from browsing to selecting content feel familiar, while adapting the experience to the unique context of an in-flight entertainment system.

03. AI-Powered Discovery

Traditional IFE browsing assumes passengers know what they’re looking for. But sometimes the hardest part is simply deciding what to watch.

We explored AI as an alternative way into the content library, allowing passengers to describe what they’re in the mood for and receive recommendations tailored to their request.

Instead of navigating through categories, passengers can use natural language to express an intent, such as a mood, genre, or type of experience they’re looking for.

This creates a second discovery model alongside traditional browsing:

Browse → Discover

and

Describe → Recommend → Discover

The AI experience was designed to complement the existing interface rather than replace it. Passengers can choose the interaction model that feels most natural to them.

04. One System, Built to Adapt

Underneath the individual screens is a flexible UI framework designed to support different airline brands, content priorities, and passenger experiences.

Components, layouts, and interaction patterns were designed to work together as a system, allowing the experience to evolve without requiring the interface to be redesigned from scratch.

This balance between consistency and configurability was central to the project and to demonstrating the potential of the RAVE Open Platform.

Highlights

🚀 Real-World Impact

Contributed to a working GUI concept showcased at Aircraft Interiors Expo 2026.