Case Study - How I helped reshape how Europe’s largest bus network is planned - from the inside.
Design Research
TIMELINE
3 years (2023 - 2025)
TEAM
2 designers + 5 POs + domain tech and product lead
COMPANY
Network planning domain at Flixbus
USERS
70+
Project Overview
My Role: Senior Product Designer
I owned
UX strategy • Design research • End-to-end UI design • Design operations
With the team
5 product teams: feature input • Engineering: feasibility & implementation • PO: roadmap & scope • UI designer: co-driver
Goal
Create a single planning experience where the most important tools appear in context, so network planners (users) can focus on network decisions, not on hunting for information or fixing version conflicts.
Problem
Network planners had to jump between 6+ disconnected tools, re-entering the same data, managing multiple versions, and holding critical details in their heads instead of in one reliable system.
TL;DR
Stat #1
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Network planners at Flix were quietly drowning in tool-switching - six or more disconnected products, excel macros, shared drives, and emails just to plan a single bus line. I mapped the full picture, proposed a unified UI concept no one believed in, watched a design sprint fail, built a prototype that changed the room, and spent the next four years turning that idea into a company-wide standard.
The Situation
A fragmented workflow hiding in plain sight
When I joined the Network Planning domain in 2020, the main planning tool handled timetables, bus rotations, driver models, and publishing. Solid on paper. But zoom out, and a different picture emerged.
Planners were also living in PowerBI dashboards, macro-heavy Excel files, profitability calculators, legal compliance checkers, and in-house scheduling tools, all running in parallel, all disconnected.
6 disconnected tools
Timetables, rotations, driver models, compliance - all in separate apps with no shared data.
No single source of truth
Versions lived on laptops, shared drivers, and inside the planning tool simulataneous.
Invisible to the teams
Each product team built in a silo. Nobody had ever seen the full user journey end-to-end.
The organisational design gap
5 product teams. Each owned a feature. Nobody owned the flow. There was no shared language, no shared lens - and no one whose job it was to see the system as a whole.
This created 2 intertwined problems that became inseparable to solve:
A fragmented UI
Users were context-switching across 6 tools daily, with no consistent patterns, navigation, or language.
No design coverage
UX had no structural model for seeing across the domain. Design was reactive, not systemic.
Design research
Before any pixel was drawn, I spent 3 months mapping what planners actually do - not what product teams thought they did.
Journey mapping
Mapped the full planning workflow across all six tools, revealing 14 hands-off points where data was lost or duplicated.
Contextual interviews
Ran 22 interviews with planners in across different regions - watching them work, not just asking about it.
Heuristic audits
Audited all six tools a shared rubric, identifying 60+ UI inconsistencies across navigation, forms and feedback patterns.
The insight that changed everything
Planners weren’t struggling with any single tool. They were struggling with the invisible space between them. The 14 moments where data had to be manually carried from one tool to the next. That became our design target.
The hard conversation
"Dependencies became interfaces. Silos became collaborators."
Six months in, I had enough research to make a case. But the case wasn't just "the UI needs work.". It was harder than that: the product teams needed to stop optimising in isolation.
That meant walking into a room with 5 Product owners and domain leads and telling them that their individually well-built products were collectively broken. Nobody had asked for that feedback. Some of them pushed back.
The decision was to go ahead anyway - but to make the research undeniable first. Journey maps on the wall. Real planners' words. Screenshots of the 14 hand-off failures. You can't argue with the person's own voice describing their own pain.
Outcome
Impact
Three results that mattered - to planners, to product teams, and to the company.
01
6 tools unified into 1 experience
Instead of switching tools, remembering information, network planners can stay in the same context and access relevant information and continue planning.
02
13% reduction in time spent per line planning
Less switching, less time spent on learning tools meaning, more time on actually planning lines.
03
Cultural shift towards holistic thinking
One UI proved that it works and this sparked new ideas all the way from business to engineering. Product teams were thinking less in product boundaries and more in end-to-end Network Planning flow.
Delivered a unified web interface where planners access all tools: route planner, profitability calculator, and optimisation engine: through contextual tabs that share data (stops, dates, routes) without re-entry. Integrated an operations-research algorithm for schedule optimisation, displaying before-and-after comparisons with clear visual highlights of changes.
UI showcase: Before
Some information have been altered to not disclose any private content.
UI showcase: After
Some information have been altered to not disclose any private content.
What I'd take forward
01
Influence before authority
Nobody reported to me. That meant every idea had to be good enough to convince people, not just presented by someone senior enough to push it through.
02
Visibility is the hardest design problem
The biggest obstacle wasn't the UI - it was making the full user journey visible to people who'd only ever seen their own slice of it.
03
DesignOps is a design problem too
Structuring how design works across a domain is itself a design challenge. It needs the same rigour - research, iteration, rituals, feedback loops.
Design on domain level
Before this project, no designer at Flixbus had ever held a cross-team, domain-level UX role. The structure didn't esit. We built it from scratch.
A new design model
We established a two-layer structure: one designer embedded in the domain focusing on UX strategy, vision, cross-team consistency) and one working on UI delivery, iteration.
Cross-team rituals
Monthly design syncs across all 5 product teams. Shared critique sessions. A living design system instead of per-team component libraries.
Design with a mandate
For the first time, UX had a seat at the domain roadmap table - not just being consulted on features, but contributing to what got built and why.
A model others copied
Within 18 months, two other domains at Flix had adopted a similar structure. the domain designer role became a real job title.
