Scope
UI/UX
Agentic Design
Blue-Sky Design
Type
Mobile
Team
1 Designer
Work For
Konrad Group
Year
2026
Duration
1 Month
The Goal
Via Rail is a robust ticketing company that provides travellers with rail options to travel across Canada. The goal of this pitch is to introduce a modern experience to their platform that integrates personalized content to increase user engagement and discoverability within the mobile app.
Current Platform
The current mobile app utilizes outdated interface design and provides a bare-minimum experience for users. Many features, such as their navigation system, provide a fragmented journey that confuses users.
The app experience also does a poor job at showing content that encourages users to discover different features and services that the company provides.
Design Approach
The design approach involved taking a close look at the visual language that Via Rail uses and optimizing it to fit a mobile-forward design system. This exercise involved looking at current mobile UI trends and selecting a style that compliments the content that the platform provides.
To increase discoverability within the mobile app, UI elements such as suggested content, filtering pills, and personalized widgets were used. The goal of introducing these new components was to create touch points with the user at the search, travel, and post-trip stage of the travelling journey.
Introducing Agentic Experiences to the App
To aide with the goal of increasing discoverability within the platform, an AI agent is proposed within the design. This agent will take in contextual clues as to what stage of the travel journey the user is in and display relevant widgets and prompts to help the user.
The goal with the AI agent is to provide complimentary features for the user at the stages of travel; browsing, planning, and on the trip. Agentic experiences are incorporated in a way that compliments the user to accomplish their goals. That could be analyzing for cheap ticket prices available, learning about a destination, or creating a trip itinerary. The core design of the AI agent is to help with the planning aspect of travel, not necessarily take control of booking the trip.
The visual language of the agentic experience on the VIA Rail pitch was an additional aspect to consider. VIA Rail currently does not have any AI experiences on their platform so it was important to find a unifying design language to communicate this technology with users, in a way that is common with other AI platforms that exist currently.
Results and Feedback
The pitch has garnered conversation surrounding the strategic use of an Agentic experience. The technology is being increasingly adopted by platforms but it was important to highlight the fact that AI has to be incorporated in a way that makes sense for the user base. Overall, the showcase of potential use cases of AI within the mobile app of Via Rail garnered further discussion on what could be possible for a future-forward app.
