This redesign project was conducted independently over the course of about one month during my end-of-studies internship, as a secondary side project driven by both personal interest and regular use of the product.
L'Officiel des Spectacles is one of Paris’ longest-standing platforms for discovering cultural events, bringing together exhibitions, theatre plays, concerts and cinema screenings across the city. While the app remains appreciated for the richness of its catalog, the mobile experience often feels dense, visually outdated and difficult to navigate.
As both a regular user of the platform and a designer interested in editorial and cultural products, I approached this project as an opportunity to rethink how cultural discovery could feel more fluid, personalised and intuitive on mobile.
The redesign focused on three main areas : introducing a personalized onboarding experience, simplifying exploration and search flows, and creating smoother booking journeys. To support these changes, I also developed a scalable design system and an interactive high-fidelity prototype.
Working within an established visual identity
Balancing editorial richness with intuitive navigation
Scoping independently, without user testing data
Heuristic evaluation
Information architecture and user flows
Design system and UI kit
High-fidelity prototyping
Micro-animations
L'Officiel des Spectacles occupies an interesting position in the cultural landscape. It's not purely a ticketing platform, and it's not purely a recommendation engine ; it's both, and that tension shows up throughout the existing mobile experience.
Its audience skews toward culturally engaged Parisians : people who visit exhibitions on weekends, catch theatre regularly, and want a reliable overview of what's on before committing to anything.
To structure my analysis of the existing app, I conducted an evaluation based on Nielsen’s 10 heuristics across the three screens where most of the experience lives: the homepage, the event page, and the booking flow. A few findings stood out as priorities :
For the kind of user this app is aimed towards, the failures in the existing experience aren't just visual inconveniences. An app that offers no recommendations forces a level of intent that doesn't always match the mood, and a booking flow that's difficult to trust is one you abandon halfway through and complete somewhere else.
Defining the redesign strategy
Before diving straight into UI, I mapped out the full user journey from first open to downloaded ticket, which helped surface where the structural problems were concentrated and what needed solving first.
One early decision that shaped the rest of the work was to push Paris-specific culture higher in the hierarchy. Exhibitions, guided visits, city tours — these are experiences that only make sense here, and they felt like exactly what the platform should own. I added Visits as a full category alongside Exhibitions and made sure both sat prominently in the navigation rather than competing with movie listings for space.
As for the visual direction, I felt that the existing colour system was doing too many things at once. Each category carried its own colour, which in theory creates differentiation, but in practice creates noise. I moved toward a single primary blue drawn from the existing brand identity, applied consistently throughout, with colour used sparingly for tags, discount labels and urgency signals rather than as a structural device. Getting there took a few rounds of iteration, mostly working through how much colour was actually necessary before it started to feel arbitrary.
The original app had no onboarding : you opened it and you were already in. The redesign introduces a short preference-setting flow before the homepage, skippable at every step, that feeds directly into the homepage's recommended sections. The goal was simply to make the app feel set up for you from the start.
The original homepage confronted users with a category grid and an event count, so that every visit started with a decision rather than a suggestion. The redesign separates two modes of use : a recommendation-led homepage for users open to being surprised, and a category and search section for users who already know what they're after.
The tab structure is gone, replaced by a single scrollable view. Key metadata sits at the top, reviews and venue information follow below, and Bookmark and Reserve CTAs stay anchored at the bottom throughout.
I designed two out of five possible flows — cinema and exhibitions — each differing slightly based on what that booking process actually requires. The main challenge was replacing the original accordion with a step-by-step structure that maps to how a user actually thinks through a booking. The segmentation I landed on was largely intuitive, and it's the part I'd most want to put in front of real users before treating it as resolved.
A design system was built in parallel with the screens rather than after them, which kept decisions consistent throughout. Components are built with variants and auto-layout, covering everything from event cards in three sizes to the calendar picker, seat map and filter sheet. Tokens are used throughout for colour and typography.
Dark mode was mapped directly onto the raw token layer, which meant the switch between light and dark required no manual overrides anywhere in the file.
The prototype also includes a set of micro-animations ; nothing elaborate given the constraints of Figma, but enough to reflect how much the feel of transitions contributes to an experience that doesn't feel assembled from parts.
Looking back, the most useful constraint this project imposed was having to make decisions entirely on my own, without a brief, a team, or dedicated time set aside for it. It was something I kept returning to in the evenings and on weekends, which meant the work moved in bursts and required a lot of re-immersion between sessions. That kind of context doesn't make for the most linear process, but it did force a certain discipline around prioritisation : there wasn't time to go deep on everything, so I had to keep asking what was actually worth solving.
The onboarding and booking flows were the clearest starting points because the problems were structural and the solutions reasonably concrete. If the project continued, the booking flows are where I'd want to spend more time with real users. The step segmentation I landed on made intuitive sense to me, but those are exactly the kind of decisions that tend to look different once someone else is actually experiencing the resulting flows.