SilverRail
Seamless Mobility
Summary
The project set out to outline the future of truly customised seamless travel, across different modes and even across borders. We produced a short video to bring the concept to life before we started building.
My role
I was the Service Design and UX lead on the project, working together with a creative lead and a visual designer. We collaborated with an offshore development team to build our Alpha app. My responsibilities included designing and facilitating stakeholder workshops, customer interviews, surveys, diary studies, moderating user testing sessions, prototyping and visual design.
Our audience
The mid-distance commuter became the core target audience for our explorations, with a focus on mainland rail. This group was used to having separate tools for journey planning, sometimes using up to 4-5 different apps and websites to navigate their daily travels. Rail users often had to combine trains with other modes of transport to reach their final destination, making them the perfect audience for an all-in-one travel app.
The vision:
>> To create a best in class personalised service for the commuter. A daily one-stop shop for all multi-modal travel needs. End to end and door to door.
The Approach
1. Ideation
The project began as an exploration, we kicked off with a co-creation session in which we outlined ideas. The core functionalities that the client knew they could support were prioritised and crafted into meaningful experiences. We sketched them up for quick and produced a Low-Fi Axure prototype to use a stimulus for our interviews with commuters.
2. Defining the experience
After a series of commuter interviews and a broader commuter survey, we began to map the experience of disrupted travellers versus those who were experiencing no issues with their journey. We matched up the pain points with comparators reviews to see which of these needs were already met by other tools. Our mission was always to cater to the full end to end experience, but this allowed us to see gaps where we had to work harder.
3. MVP
Guided by the insights we were uncovering our thinking and our designs evolved quickly. We had commuters prioritise the key functionalities of the tool to help us craft a desirable first product. In parallel, we ran MVP workshops with the client and the build partner to ensure feasibility and plot a timeline for delivery.
The Alpha
Since our focus was commuting we decided to use the cyclical recurrence of this type of travel as a source of inspiration. The client's goal was to be different from comparator apps on the market so we settled on the idea of a circular experience. The user could see their trip as a part of a circle, scroll forward to see upcoming legs and progress.
At the end of the day, the circle flipped, ready for the evening commute.
Visual Direction
Equipped with a roadmap we began to build out Alpha app is series of two-week agile sprints. The development team was based in Prague. We only met face to face for important planning and discussions, for the day-to-day we used Skype as a doorway between countries. While back-end tasks occupied the first few sprints on the dev side, back in London we were crafting the brand experience. We tested two approaches to the design Go Ninja and Scoot.
Go Ninja!
Scoot
35% Go Ninja
"I like this one, it made me smile.
This is actually more fun."
65% Scoot
"It's big and bold, clearer and more about the information."
While Go Ninja was playful and engaging, Scoot was clean and to the point. We A-B tested the two designs, our users found Ninja more fun, but not in line with the pragmatic mindset they usually have when traveling. Scoot won the day and we continued with the typographic approach for the Alpha. However, the idea of Ninja, stuck. People identified with the thought of becoming a ninja with the help of an app.
Building and Testing
Testing the live app with active rail commuters required a lot of coordination. As a UX lead, I was in charge of running a continuous diary study with the 25 participants, along with regular observation sessions and interviews. The design, build and testing ran in parallel. We completed a total of 4 releases over 8 weeks. The rapid two-week sprints requited close collaboration to quickly convert the learnings from user testing into actionable recommendations for design changes and quickly get them included into the following development sprints.
With the rapid feedback from users, our designs and functionalities evolved quickly. The app grew after the eight weeks into a tangible customer-centric product. However, further development was put on hold until additional funding becomes available.
