Brief
This was one of the larger projects that was undertaken by myself during my time at Byway. It was a project that involved the entire Design thinking process and focussed on the 'Empathy', 'Define', 'Ideate' and 'Prototype' phases and aimed to bring customer insights into a refresh of the trips booking experience.
Context
Byway lets you book pre-made train travel trips all across Europe. These would be created by the Byway team and made available to book on their website.
Customers loved Byway trips, their team took away much of the complexity around travelling by train. But there was a vocal majority who wanted more flexibility once they had found a trip to their desired destination.
Byway tasked me with designing a solution that blended the information that Customers already loved, with the power to offer the individual customer more flexibility over the shape of and content of their trip.
Empathy & Definition
Post booking surveys, post trip surveys and customer interviews were the tools of choice for customer insights. Surveys were conducted by myself and the CMO for both customer that did and didn't book with Byway to help remove any bias in convesations.
Additional insights were gathered from running quick A/B tests on areas of the site and gauging click rate to determine if this was information the customer was interested in and therefore needed to be prioritised in the design. An experience map was produced to help present the customers journeys to multiple internal stakeholders.
Much of the definition of the customers problems had been undertaken by the Byway team previously, however it was important to make this clearly defined for the purpose of this project.
The Byway team were confident in a number of improvements to be made to the trip page in terms of information architecture and general content strategy, but it was up to me to further define potential overall visions.
Competitive analysis of similar builder tools was undertaken, for example, the IKEA PAX wardrobe builder helped identify some design patterns that could make their way into the Byway solution.
Some more direct competitors were also reviewed, such as the 'Railbookers' website.
Ideation & Prototyping
Byway wanted to see ideas fairly swiftly to see my thinking process more clearly. I began to flesh out low-fidelity wireframes and receive internal feedback to further refine the vision.
The Byway team were kept constantly updated almost daily with the changes I was making by way of Loom video recordings, and end-of-day design presentations.
Low-fidelity to high-fidelity prototypes
Low-fidelity wireframes gave way to high-fidelity versions which started to incorporate more Byway branding into the designs.In tandem, prototypes were created in Figma and shared internally.
Usability testing
Finally, these prototypes were taken through internal and external usability tests and used SCS (Success Criteria Scoring) which broke down the usability test into steps which could be scored in terms of their completion success. In addition, I used Ease Of Use (or Single Ease ) questions to gain a general understanding of our customers feelings towards a particular set of tasks.
The results from the Usability tests were very encouraging with customers expressing a liking towards the trip 'timeline' UI pattern and the use of clear, large input prompts, clear signposting of where they were at any given time and use of colour to enhance comprehension when looking at a large amount of information on a page.
A great learning experience
As mentioned at the beginning, this concept never made it through into production. However, that doesn't mean that It wasn't a valuable experience to understake such a challenging problem.
I learned so much during this project and excercised ways to overcome many challenges including stakeholder pushback, communication, user research and usability testing. It was a fulfilling experience to be able to be presented with such a challenge and exercise my problem solving skills on an ambitious vision.