Improving the RedBus app
I’m writing this post by imagining myself as a Product Manager at Redbus. I use RedBus occasionally and feel that it is a great product because it solves a really big problem faced by millions of people of booking bus tickets. It has played a great role in organizing the unorganized market for bus ticket bookings. It is very innovative because it helps the user in booking the exact seat of his choice and in tracking the live location of the bus. And moreover, their customer support is awesome. As per their website, this is what RedBus says about itself “RedBus is world’s largest online bus-ticketing organization. At redBus, you can check schedules, select your favorite bus, view the seat layout, pay and get your bus ticket — All with a few clicks of your mouse or a few taps on your phone! redBus has over 8 million happy customers and has sold more than 75 million tickets globally!”
It has a presence in 6 countries India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Peru and Columbia. After doing a quick Google Trends Analysis I found that RedBus has a pretty flattish chart of people searching about RedBus on Google. I assume that this chart should have a co-relation to customer retention. Therefore, I can infer that RedBus has a great product-market fit. However, the slope of the graph is going slightly negative in the past few years. This indicates that RedBus has to constantly innovate by launching new features in their product to stay ahead of the competition and maintain their market leader status.
I think international expansion is working out well for them as it has helped them in acquiring more customers. Google Trends graph for Malaysia and Indonesia for RedBus indicates their increasing popularity in the new Geographies.
Now that the context is set. Let’s get straight to point on how I would improve RedBus. The objective of my improvement is to improve the user experience of the RedBus app which would make RedBus more user-friendly and customer-centric application. I will focus on improving the pre-travel experience of the user journey. For any travel booking app, the customer journey can primarily be broken into 2 parts. First, the pre-travel experience where the user searches and compares various travel options, shortlists the one that is most suitable to him and then books the tickets. Second, is the post-payment experience where the user uses the ticket provided to him, reaches the boarding point, completes the journey, rates the travel experience.
The pre-travel User Experience in Redbus has the following steps:
DISCOVER: The user enters the destinations and date on which he wants to travel. He can use various filters like sleeper, non-sleeper, live tracking etc and sorting criteria to make the result page more relevant to him.
SELECT BUS: User selects the bus that he wants to book. He can view various amenities that are present on the bus. He can view the photographs, user reviews, timings etc of the bus.
SELECT SEAT: Once the user has selected the bus then he can select the seat of his choice from the layout of available seats.
REVIEW BOOKING: Do a quick review of the booking, date, total cost, boarding and drop locations. Go back if you want to edit make the relevant changes and review the booking again. He gets 5–6 mins of buffer time to complete his booking. In the meanwhile, his seat would appear as booked to other people trying to book a seat on the same bus.
PAYMENT: After reviewing the booking. The user gets the option to select his preferable mode of payment through Credit Card, Debit Card, Net Banking or Mobile Wallets. Once he completes the payment his seat is confirmed and he gets the booking details on his Email, App, Whatsapp and RedBus account.
In my view, the app can be improved in each of these touchpoints. Let's consider the Discover phase. When you have selected the from location
(Gurgaon in this case) and tap on the destination field. You see the below screen.
The result screen shows Recent Cities searched by the user and some random Top Locations which have almost zero probability of someone selecting it. For example, chances os someone booking a bus ride from Gurgaon to Coimbatore/Chennai/Mumbai is extremely less because these cities are thousands of km's away. A better approach is to show Destinations that are closer to the From city. This will help the user to spend less time searching for the destination.
Second, while Selecting the Bus the user should be able to see the To and From cities and the date of travel very clearly. Currently, the information of the cities do not easily fit in the display bar and date of travel is also missing. At times, the user also wants to share the bus details with friends and families to get their opinion. Therefore, a share option should also be given to the users to share the bus details to others. Below image highlights the proposed changes.
Third, selecting Bus Seat. Currently, some buses do offer differential pricing
of seats. Usually, the last row of seats in the buses does not have a reclining position. This makes these seats relatively less comfortable than other seats on the bus. User should be given more information about other seats in the layout like front seats having extra legroom and a better view of the outside world. Maybe, some seats have a better position than others to watch the movie being played. These changes will boost confidence in the user to finalize his seat. It also can be monetizing opportunity for RedBus.
Fourth, reviewing the bus ticket booked before making the final payment. This screen clearly needs two areas of improvement as shown in the image below. First, the source and the destination cities should be clearly visible on the top. Second, the travel insurance option currently has Remove-Only option.
This can be interchanged with a toggle button to add or remove travel insurance without the need for the user to go back to the booking page to add insurance again.
If I had to prioritise the changes that I have proposed then I would use a simple 2 x 2 matrix of Impact vs Effort and map the changes in this graph. I would pick something which has high impact low effort and eliminate high effort low impact changes.
Adding relevant top destinations depending on the from city has low to medium effort and mid to high impact on the user experience. Making From and To destinations visually more appealing would require low effort and would have medium effect on impact. More options for differential charges of seats would require high effort and would have medium to high impact on the users. Toggle switch for insurance selection needs low effort and would have high impact on user experience. Therefore, my order for implementing these changes would be 1) Toggle Switch for Insurance 2) Making To and From city names more visually appealing 3) Adding relevant locations for destination suggestions 4) Adding more options for multiple pricing of seats
In order to measure the success of these changes, I would track the following KPIs avg time taken to book a ticket should decrease, the ratio of suggested destinations to manual searches of destination per session should increase, NPS score should also increase and the most important metric is the conversion ratio of users buying bus tickets should improve.
These were the incremental changes that I would have introduced in RedBus app. In the next post, I will share my view on how to improve monetizing opportunities of RedBus. Share your thoughts on what changes would you like to see in the RedBus app.
