WorldRail Train Booking Experience
Project Overview
WorldRail is a concept. It helps users find & book rail travel in all corners of the world. Price comparison, seat selection, and accessibility requests for your upcoming trip can now be done with only a few clicks. WorldRail operates across all of your devices making for a seamless, connected experience. Find your itinerary. Book your travel. Download tickets on your phone. Train travel made easy.
My Contributions
I planned out and executed the entire project - from research, to IA, to wireframing, and on to the final product - a modern & competitive responsive e-commerce website would have all the desired features for its users.
My Role: UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma, Whimsical, OptimalSort, Miro, Maze
Duration: 6 weeks
There is a considerable amount of upfront research involved in booking rail travel & the process can be confusing, exhausting, and time-consuming. Current rail booking websites are very limited in nature. Unlike with airline online booking, which is widely accessible & is more or less standard wherever you go, rail booking is very region/country-specific and is largely dependent on local access, transportation laws, and funding. There is no consistency in the booking process from one region, train operator, and booking site to another. Very few sites offer comprehensive world-wide rail booking all in one place. WorldRail is the first of its kind to offer one-stop train booking covering most world regions.
WorldRail helps users find & book rail travel in all corners of the world. Price comparison, seat selection, and accessibility requests for your upcoming trip can now be done with only a few clicks across different rail providers & countries. WorldRail operates on all your devices making for a seamless, connected experience. Find your itinerary. Book your travel. Download tickets on your phone. Train travel that's truly made easy.
Project Timeline
EMPATHIZE
User Research
Understanding users’ needs is essential for designing a new product. My research focused around gleaning insights into how users approach the general travel booking process, as well as dive deeper into their experience with booking train travel. The research was conducted in an interview format via Zoom.
Research Objectives
1. Understand how users currently book regional rail travel.
2. Understand what actions users take when they consider shopping for rail travel.
3. Understand what defines an ultimate rail travel shopping & booking experience.
4. What are the key features necessary to create this?
5. What pain points exist for the user when it comes to booking train travel?
6. Gather data to glean insights into the competitive landscape; learn which sites customers prefer to book travel on & why.
6 participants, ages 27-54 who have traveled by rail in the past.
Key Insights
- General Insight: Train booking process feels dated - booking sites tend to feel clunky and not user friendly
- General Insight: Trains are confusing - there is a lack of information on the different train options, transfers, or station changes
- Need: A "Kayak" for trains
- Need: Clarity on the type of tickets purchased
- Need: Accessibility request booked at time of reservation with confidence that it will be honored
- Need: E-ticket/wallet options
- Pain Point: Issues with changing ticket reservations particularly when booking through third party sites
- Pain Point: Inability to reserve seats ahead of time
- Pain Point: No English translation when booking travel abroad or difficulty finding English language option
- Pain Point: Cost; train travel tends to be pricier in many parts of the world, deterring many people from using it (case in point US and Asia).
- Pain Point: Lack of trust in transportation sites (broken features, too buggy, etc)
User Personas
My research was focused on users of different ages & travel needs. Many of the users I spoke with were young professionals who do quite a bit of travel who wished there was more personalization in train experiences, while there was also representation of an older demographic who cared about accessibility & having access to train information. Hence, I established two personas that were most representative of my researched user base.
DEFINE
Defining Key Features - Roadmap
My research pointed to a handful of important feature must have's that are missing in the current train ticket offerings, mainly around detailed train, station, and transfer information, e-ticket options, and accessibility requests.
Information Architecture - Sitemap
I wanted to structure the site so that there is as much focus on the various available train experiences as there is on the more functional aspects of the site such as shopping cart, search, user profile, and access to e-tickets.
Information Architecture - User Flow
It was important for me to see how a user would navigate WorldRail to book tickets, a key task for a rail booking site. Making any kind of purchase is a sort of commitment , particularly with travel, where there are so many options around dates, departure times, prices, and rail providers. There are a myriad of decisions that go into train booking process, as well as many scenarios where a user will be distracted, or deterred from booking that ticket. In this user flow I tried to reflect some of the different thought processes that ultimately lead the user to completing that purchase.
IDEATE
Responsive Mid-Fi Wireframes
After defining the product’s architecture, features, and structure I was excited to start wireframing. For my mid-fidelity wireframes I wanted to focus on WorldRail’s unique selling points (USP’s) as well as make the design as intuitive as possible, while giving user access to a variety of information and flexibility in options.
- Homepage - top of page navigation menu, prominent search bar within a hero image, a display of Top 3 USPs. Followed by two larger placements of USPs for a powerful visual effect inviting for interaction with the CTA’s.
- Experiences Page - regional train information links sending a user to region-specific pages. Top train experiences section follows highlighting the most popular of the train adventures. Information on various touchpoints of the train experience (pre-boarding, to getting to the station, to train amenities once already on board.
- Ticket Selection - this is one of the early steps in the checkout process. Clearly laid out boxes with ticket class information & features, ability to select a car as well as seats (a USP), as well as a working accessibility request option, which was one of the pain points that came out of user research.
INTERACTION DESIGN
Design Systems
Design systems are an integral part of any design framework. These systems ensure connectivity between all the elements and all the different parts of the design thinking process.
TEST
Usability Testing
Test Objectives
- Test the ease and efficiency of completing a purchase process by user - from selecting a train itinerary, to adding it to cart, to then going through a full checkout process.
- Test WorldRail’s usability flows around sign-up process & account creation.
- Test the ease of downloading & adding a train ticket to phone wallet.
Test Conditions & Participation
An unguided test conducted via Maze was taken by 34 participants in a mobile environment. The testers had to complete a total of 3 missions and answer subsequent questions.
Missions:
1. Sign-up/Account Creation Process
2. Ticket Search & Checkout Process
3. e-Ticket Download & Saving to iPhone wallet
Priority Revisions
Based on usability test findings I made the decision to prioritize the following product page revisions:
- Including “My Tickets” under the Hamburger menu, as a lot of users clicked on the hamburger when trying to find their purchased train tickets. The tickets were initially located under the “My Account” avatar. I decided to keep the original location and also add the ticket link under the hamburger menu.
- Checkout process needs to be more intuitive, which means expediting it to 4 steps, also adding progressive disclosure to the different stages and visibility of system status. Also made the decision to exclude accessibility option for my revision as it was a point of confusion for a many testers. This will be a non-priority revision.
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CONCLUSIONS
This was both a challenging & exciting project in the fact that it allowed me to really go nuts with creating a brand new responsive travel website, travel being something I am very passionate about. Research is a key part of any design process and it’s especially important in the setting of a wide-breadth project such as this. Testing the prototypes is equally as important as it really helps you validate (or invalidate) some of the original hypotheses around user preferences. If time constraint wasn’t a factor I would retest the revised checkout flow to make sure that I accomplished the task of making this process less complex and more intuitive. A non-priority revision that I did not tackle as part of this assignment is to ensure accessibility request option is running smoothly & is not confusing to the user.
Want to work together?
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
irina.adler@gmail.com
