Fixing Train Ticket Confirmation Email
Why searching train tickets in my inbox is hell and how we could fix it.
My partner lives in Germany while I’m settled in Paris, France. One of the immediate consequences of this situation is that I spend a lot of time in German trains, which gets me spending a lot of time on the Deutsche Bahn (DB) website (the German train company). Here starts the story.
I could — but I won’t — talk about the overall user experience of booking tickets through DB’s website or app. I’d like to highlight a single but huge pain point occurring at the end of my user journey: finding the ticket in my inbox when I eventually need it.
Let’s set the scene
Participant’s name: Kyril Schmoutz
Internet usage and digital skills: Spends his days trying to make the web a better place for humans. He sometimes sends emails to companies to complain about their User eXperience. He feels weird about it but hey, everyone has a hobby right?
Relationship with the service: Frequent traveler. He is used to book several train tickets months in advance (mainly because his German girlfriend’s passion is planning stuff).
Task: The participant is asked to find a ticket he received months ago in his inbox.
The way I do it currently
I usually type in the search field of my inbox “Bahn” because it’s an efficient way to list all emails sent by the Deutsche Bahn. Here is what the results look like:
Let’s analyse the data we have in the email subject for a sec. “Buchungsbestätigung” means Booking confirmation — ok. “Auftrag XXXXX” is my order number. If everything goes fine, which I hope, no one will ask me this number ever again during my customer experience. Last but not least, my German is nicht so gut. In the end of the day, none of what is displayed here makes sense to me.
Here, I’m trapped. I cannot rely on the chronological order of the mails because I can book from one week to another or sometimes months before. Of course, the information I would need to check if it’s the good ticket is not available in the mail itself but in the attached file. So I’m sentenced to open each mail, scroll down to the bottom of the page, open the pdf version of my ticket and check if the date and the destination correspond to my journey. Well sorry for my French but that’s very painful.
What can we propose then?
This particular email is the last step of the booking experience. It’s also the point from where I will start to interact with the brand again a few days/hours before my departure. Two critical moments for users, we can’t just neglect them.
I suggest we do a couple of iterations focusing only on the subject of our precious email. Of course we’ll take real data for this experiment, listing the last journeys I scheduled.
Iteration #1 —Fulfill the basic needs
What do people want to see when searching for train tickets in their inbox? What are their basic expectations? A suggestion would be the date of the journey. I have to take the train next Monday, I need to find this particular ticket.
Then, let’s say the starting and destination point. People tend to usually remember at least one of these, right? They might also know the name of the train company.
Well, let’s see what we can do with that already.
What do you think? Here, we have the basic information we need to quickly find the good ticket. Our users can easily search for the starting or destination point and identify the proper ticket thanks to the departure date. Also, we added the keyword DB which stands for Deutsche Bahn. it’s a persistant label so people can rely on it when searching anything related to the company in the future. Most of all, my bad German is not a pain point anymore as the practical information displayed don’t need any translation to be understood.
Iteration #2 — A smart design language
When you travel a lot, a second layer of information could be very useful. First, it could be interesting to show if the journey is just one way or both ways. If we think about international travelers, the journey can start in a country and finish in another. The problem is we need to keep our copy short. Can we manage that without bringing to much complexity to our email subject?
We added the countries by their international code close to the city when needed (only for international journeys). Simple characters will do a great job to add some affordance to our message and suggest one way (=>) or both ways (<=>). Of course, people might not get it at the first use. But the learning curve is smooth and we can trust frequent travelers to understand and love these hints.
Iteration #3 — Add some love
Eventually, our keyword DB might be replaced by something more friendly. Something more visual perhaps, so that our users can quickly identify emails containing train tickets. Guys, I think it’s time to play with emojis ♥.
Of course emojis! They are totally compatible with mail clients and they are the only visual craziness allowed in our email subject. We can now visually identify the emails of my future and past journeys with the DB, just by scanning a long list of text which becomes a strong advantage for the brand.
The magic of it is that we can push it even further and give information about the type of trains/rails involved: 🚄 for high speed trains, 🚈 for regional trains and so on…
Takeaways
Emails stay a very important touchpoint between the brands and their users. Knowing that your customers receive on average 123 emails per day (Radicati — Email statistic report 2015–2019), please don’t make their life even harder sending emails with vague and meaningless subject lines.
In three small iterations and with strong design constraints, we came from a useless email subject to a recognizable and meaningful message where you can see at a glimpse of an eye the departure date, the overall journey, the countries involved, and if you have to worry or not about your return ticket.
We’ve also addressed the different layers of the Kano model, solving first the basic expectations of our users and adding at each iteration appropriate features and visual excitement.
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