PortAventura Digital Experience

A 2.2 App Store rating, broken commerce flows, and a fixed seasonal deadline. No room to iterate after launch.

PortAventura is one of Europe's largest theme parks. Their app had a 2.2 rating on the App Store, a public signal of a broken digital experience. The brief was to rebuild it entirely: same feature set, new architecture, new design, new revenue logic. The deadline was fixed. The park season waits for no one.

I led a team of three designers through the full product lifecycle, from strategic scoping to final delivery, while simultaneously managing the relationship with senior stakeholders on the client side.

The first decision was also the most consequential: reframe the app not as a visitor guide, but as a revenue surface. A theme park app is used in a high-stimulation, low-patience environment. That reality defined the entire design philosophy: radical simplicity in navigation, and commercial intent embedded directly into the moments of highest user engagement.

The interactive map was the most technically and strategically complex component. On the surface, a wayfinding tool. In practice, the primary purchase entry point for Express Passes and restaurant reservations. I pushed to integrate transactional capability directly into the point-of-interest cards rather than routing users to a separate commerce flow. Fewer steps between desire and purchase. The data confirmed the logic, though honestly it was also just obvious once you watched people use the park.

The real-time audio transcription feature for the Uncharted attraction queue was a different kind of challenge, an accessibility and engagement problem operating in an extreme context. Users are standing in a queue, in a noisy environment, phone in hand, in up to four different languages simultaneously. Designing a readable, low-friction in-app transcription experience for those conditions required rethinking hierarchy, typography, and interaction timing from first principles. It was also one of the few features that served accessibility, engagement, and international reach in a single solution.

Delivery was non-negotiable, but scope was. When it became clear that timeline pressure was real, I made two calls: freeze incremental feature additions to the home experience, and redirect part of the team from new improvements to completing the committed redesign at the quality level the launch required. Shipping something half-finished on a park season deadline isn't a compromise. It's a failure with an audience of millions.