Client Project with Trainline

In this 6-week project, I collaborated with 4 other UX designer and presented Trainline with a design solution regarding incorporating travel inspiration to the existing Trainline app.

Project Deliverables:

  • User research

  • Experience map

  • User journey map

  • User testing

  • Storyboard

  • Information architecture

  • Mockups and prototypes

Project Specifications:

Duration: 6 weeks

Tools: Figma, Miro

Roles:

  • UI Designer

  • UX Researcher & Designer

Overview

Trainline is a Europe’s leading train and bus app where you can book train tickets, cheap bus travel and more.

Create a personalised and engaging train travel planning process that effortlessly guides customers from inspiration, through tailored recommendations, to finalising their purchase.

The challenge

Encourage customers to complete their purchase by introducing an inspired browser in their existing app

Our goal

Business Objectives

According to the brief, there are certain things that Trainline want us to address:

Target audience

Cater to budget conscious adventures looking for inspiration

Cater to couples wanting a last-minute weekend city break without flying

Opportunity

Explore the possibility of partnerships with the new features

For primary research, we interviewed 7 participants who considered themselves being budget conscious travellers, we then went to London for a day trip as our autoethnography to empathise with our target user group.

Primary Research

Interviews

Focused on discovering:

  • Travel habits

  • Booking habits

  • Experience with Trainline

Autoethnography

Focused on discovering:

  • Inspiration finding process

  • Travel planning process

  • Struggles we faced during travelling

Insights

Based on the research, we have identified 3 primary problems we want to address.

Weather influences travel choices and often the reason why user make last-minute ticket bookings.

Rising prices can deter users from completing their purchase, especially for leisure trips, as it is considered as a want more than a need.

User struggled to find activities to do when they arrive, they are switching between platforms, such as Google map, to look for activities inspiration

Where is Trainline currently at?

Currently Trainline is only involved in the booking stage, but based on the research we could see there are design opportunities that lie before and after the booking stage (at the inspiration finding and travel planning phase)

Insights to Solution

  1. Can we capitalise bad weather? How?

  2. While Trainline have no control over train prices, can we in any way lower the cost of the journey?

  3. What tailored recommendations should we provide?

When ideating, we have 3 questions in mind:

In our initial concept, we focus on removing the barriers that hinder user from booking their tickets and to make travel planning as effortless as possible.

Initial Concept

Ideas that we gave up due to business constraints:

  1. Temporary chat group for group travellers: too costly to build and maintain a chat feature

  2. Travel history heatmap: difficult to store a large set of data for each user

Storyboard

How’s the new features going to work?

We created the mock-ups and presented the prototype to 5 budget constraint travellers for user testing to get feedback for further iterations.

User Testing

Some feedbacks:

“It would be nice to see nearby activities as well so that I can decide where I want to go”

“More visuals!”

90%

of our participant were satisfied with the feature and find it successful in creating travel inspirations

Solution

“Explore Everywhere” button

With the newly added button “Explore everywhere”, users can look at nearby destinations and also search by themes for travel inspirations.

Search by map

Utilising the map feature, users could also explore nearby activities and locations with favourable weather conditions to decide where they want to go.

Price tracker

As higher prices can act as deterrents, causing potential travellers to hesitate or even abandon their bookings, the price tracker can encourage user with flexible travel date to complete their purchase by notifying users when the price gone down.

Travel guide

Here we created two entry points to the guide, one at the home page, and another under the ticket.

Considering the poor signal on the train, we also added a feature that allow user to download the guide beforehand

August 2023 Update

Trainline added the Price Prediction feature 2 months after the project has ended.