Case study: train ticket app redesign
Namaste!
In this case study, let’s try to make life easier for a railway commuter. I am going to redesign the revolutionary Unreserved Ticketing System app (UTS on mobile) which thousands of commuters use daily to buy their online journey tickets on Indian Railways.
On 16th December 2019, 8.33 lakh passengers booked tickets using UTS mobile app in Mumbai Division, Central Railway.
That’s a huge number!
Let us see what exactly is the UTS app?
‘Unreserved Mobile Ticketing’ facility (UTS on Mobile) app is launched by Indian railways for buying unreserved tickets online. Unreserved tickets of all sections across all railway zones have been made available on the app. The app is available on Android, Windows and ios platforms. The app has paperless and paper tickets, online payment facility. This allows travelers to book their journey tickets online.
There are some unique features of the UTS app due to which it is popular amongst users.
- Convenient ticket booking on Mobile
- Online Payment & Wallet option
- Valid across all routes
- Booked Ticket can be shown even without the internet
- A screenshot is not allowed which prevents repetitive travel on the same ticket
Sounds great, isn’t it?
But when I started using the app, it felt quite old and there was a good scope for user experience enhancement. So let’s dive into the redesigning journey of the UTS app.
Need of improvement
Although the app is functional, it was felt that there is a need of improvement in various aspects, including but not limited to Ticket booking journey, login & signup journey, payment etc. The user experience & visual design was violating design heuristics. A better design was essential for a smooth experience.
Problem Statement
“How might we create a user friendly booking journey for the unreserved ticketing system app?”
Project Vision
We aim to redesign the UTS app. We intend to make it more user friendly where travelers can purchase tickets easily & quickly. It will be a completely new experience from login to ticket booking.
Project Objective
UTS app on playstore has crossed over 10 million downloads. Currently, as there is no other authorized option to buy suburban tickets online, people are using the UTS app despite it’s dated user experience & design. People get adapted to bad design very quickly. For a better user experience, a refreshed design was essential. I will be concentrating on the following points,
- To design a user-friendly app adding to the enhanced ticket booking experience and trust.
- To assist in boosting the steadily increasing ticket sales figures through the UTS app, reaching an even larger number of users.
Project KPIs
UTS app already has a huge number of daily users. The reason being it’s the only option available to book suburban tickets online. However, we can improve customer engagement on the app and also the customer funnel statistics. This will ultimately result in an improved conversion rate and profitability. Keeping track of what we are doing and what is the outcome is important. Here are some key points and analytics to be considered from the business point of view to measure the performance of the project.
- CES (Customer Effort Score)
This metric shows how much effort the customer thinks they had to put in to successfully purchase a ticket.
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
A customer satisfaction score indicates how satisfied your current customers are with the product.
- User Engagement
We can track Sessions required to user for each booking. Lower the number of sessions, greater the satisfaction. We can also track the change in number of users with the improved app.
- Ticket Bookings
Change in revenue generated from UTS app will be our important KPI. We can compare the number of bookings per month and on a quarterly basis. We can observe the improved ticket sales figures via UTS app.
The Design Process :
Heuristic Evaluations
Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles. The main goal of heuristic evaluations is to identify any problems associated with the design. We have applied Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics and Severity scale.
For the UTS app Heuristic evaluation, issues were categorized low, medium or high based on their severity (Impact on usability).
Stage1: Domain research
Understanding Ticket Booking & UTS App
Unreserved tickets can be booked anytime and are specific to the journey route. These tickets are not specific to any train nor you get any seat confirmation for them. The best example of an unreserved ticket is a Suburban ticket. Long-distance unreserved tickets are also available. UTS app is the railway’s authorized solution to book these unreserved tickets online via mobile.
The main purpose of the UTS app is to enable seamless booking of unreserved tickets all over Indian Railways, wiping out the need for passengers to wait in queues for purchasing the tickets.
This move aims to promote 3C’s -
- Cashless transactions (Digital payment)
- Contactless ticketing (no need to physically visit the point of sale)
- Customer convenience
Another feature of UTS app is, you can show your ticket offline even without an internet connection. Quite useful while traveling without the internet.
Few takeaways from research are,
- Spread over 390 km, Mumbai suburban railway operates 2,342 trains daily and carries 7.5 million passengers daily. By annual ridership, it is one of the busiest networks in the world. Speaking widely, 80% of the commuters use pass during normal days. Even with the remaining 20% of people, the waiting time on ticket windows was around 20 minutes during peak hours.
- UTS app is the only authorized solution to book a suburban & unreserved ticket online on the Indian Railways network.
- Paperless & paper tickets, season & platform tickets can be booked and tickets can be shown even without the internet. In-app screenshots are not allowed for booked tickets which prevents sharing of the booked ticket.
- Currently, an unreserved ticket can be bought via the following ways,
- Ticket window (offline)
- ATVM/CoATVM machine (offline)
- JTBS counters (offline)
- UTS app (online)
- In December 2014, A pilot project for buying unreserved tickets through mobile phones was commenced on select stations on the Central railway. Later in 2015 to 2017, it was extended to many suburban sections with the facility of paperless ticketing.
- During its early stages, In January 2018, 1.8 lakh passengers used the app per day, in September it rose to 4.4 lakh passengers and in October the number of passengers using the app climbed to 4.75 lakh per day. The revenue generated currently from the app is around Rs 45 lakh per day. The app is gaining popularity amongst users. On 16th December 2019, 8.33 lakh passengers booked tickets using UTS mobile app in Mumbai Division, Central Railway.
- To be able to purchase tickets via UTS app, user should have an android or ios phone with internet connectivity. Users should register with the app. Paperless tickets can be booked only within a 2 km radius of the source station.
Interesting topic? See my detailed RESEARCH HERE
Competitor Analysis
In case of the UTS app, there are no direct competitors as it’s the only official app available to book the suburban and long-distance unreserved tickets. We have to refer to indirect competitors and see what they are offering. This helps us to get an idea of the current trends in online ticketing. There are many apps for long-distance reserved ticket booking & metro ticket booking. We searched for similar apps and monitored their features, functions, and experiences and the outcome we have is the report of the competitive analysis shown below.
View the complete COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Feature Roadmap
A feature roadmap is created by considering the features and their priority listed together for gaining insights easily. After analyzing competitors, we can decide about the features that we can facilitate in our app. Having a feature road map helps to understand the requirements and plan the work according to priority.
Time, technology, skills, manpower, and the cost is to be considered as one metric called “Cost” and “Impact” as the other unit.
You can view the detailed FEATURE ROADMAP HERE.
Feature Matrix
The feature matrix helps to find the focus area and features of the app. We can get clarity about the cost & impact factors of a particular feature.
Stage 2: Understanding Users
UTS app is used by a vast number of people from different age groups and professions. The best way to get to know about the users is by discussing with them. Feedback from the existing users of UTS app was necessary. Rather than having an informal, open-ended conversation, we created a list of relevant and structured questions. I interviewed people on the telephone to get their opinions and answers to those questions.
You can see my Interview plan over HERE and the Response sheet over HERE.
Interested to hear the discussion audio clips? AUDIO CLIPS HERE.
Summary of findings from user interviews:
5 participants who were using UTS app for their railway tickets were interviewed from the age group 24 to 46. Most of them were not happy with the overall experience and User Interface of the app.
- App usage -
All of the participants were using the app more than 3 to 4 times a week average. All of them had an active internet connection most of the time.
3 participants used app more for weekend journeys
2 participants used app on almost daily basisTicket Booking -
- Ticket Booking -
Participants like the convenience of booking train tickets on mobile. It’s time-saving as they can avoid queues. They also liked the additional facilities like season ticket booking.
For journey tickets, everybody were preferring a paperless ticket while traveling alone or together. When traveling in separate coaches, participants preferred book print tickets. Season ticket users booked a book print season ticket.
- Payment -
4 out of 5 participants were using R-wallet as a payment gateway.
A participant wasn’t able to locate the other payment gateway option at the payment stage.
1 participant felt the need for additional payment methods.
- Overall experience -
Almost all the participants were unhappy with the distance constraints applicable while booking a paperless ticket. You need to be within a 2km radius of the railway station and also outside the geo-fenced railway station premises.
Participants felt the app design and layout is outdated. They also mentioned about the unnecessary menus on home screen which they were not using many times.
Domain research revealed that there are several types of personalities who will be using our product. So let’s meet Ramya, our Primary persona in which I have integrated all of our user personalities. Let’s see what are her Motivations, fears & frustrations while booking a Journey Ticket online.
Meet Ramya…
Ramya is 28 years old professional working as a Financial Analyst in a reputed MNC. She is an extrovert person and travels daily to her workplace by train. She can’t afford to lose her daily local train. She likes the convenience of mobile ticket booking but expecting something better for the same.
Empathy Map
An empathy map is a process that helps designers to understand and visualize a user’s emotions in depth. From our persona, we can get to know in-depth about Ramya’s behavior and thinking process and could understand it clearly.
User Journey Map
We created a user journey map that helped us to define what a typical railway commuter would want to achieve at each stage of the decision-making process, their goals and expectations, actions, thoughts and feelings, emotional level, influences and touchpoint with the brand. This gave us enough clarity regarding product and business goals.
Project Goals
Indian railways is a huge organization but every organization’s success is based on profitability. It’s time to focus on business goals. A project becomes a success when both the business and the users are satisfied. I decided to build a profitable model by mapping the user’s goals with business goals. Later on, mutual goals were identified which gave us a clear direction to move ahead.
Information Architecture
Information Architecture is the foundation for providing a seamless user experience. A sitemap is created which will provide effortless navigation to users.
This Information Architecture is only made for the ticket booking journey.
Stage 3: Design
Low fidelity Paper Sketches
Just simple paper and pencil sketches! These allowed me to try multiple iterations at the beginning stage. It was easy to find out what is working and what’s not so I can come up with a better solution.
Tool Based Wireframes
A low-fidelity wireframe with a working prototype was made in Figma. It helped us to get a clear idea about the arrangements of all elements, on-screen visual form and presentation for the project. An interactive prototype worked like an actual website so users were able to relate it to an actual product.
See all of the WIREFRAMES HERE
User Interaction Testing
I designed a test plan and conducted the usability testing of the app wireframe prototype. This is essential to validate the design. Participants were given tasks and their behavior was observed. Participants were encouraged to discuss openly whatever comes into their mind while using the prototype.
Feedback was analyzed which gave me more clarity for the design and user’s thought process.
Findings From User Testing:
From the user testing, we can conclude that the prototype is a success for the ticket booking journey. User testing helped us to uncover some issues in elements that needed to be fixed for better usability. Some of them are listed below,
- After Displaying the total fare on journey details page besides proceed CTA, the next ticket summary screen felt unnecessary. It helped us to shorten the ticket purchase journey.
- We simplified the Train Type input on Journey details page by adding a tab selection instead of a dropdown menu.
Click to view the OBSERVATION SHEET
Style Guide
It’s the beginning of our visual design. I selected shades of blue color as it represents trustworthiness which is the essence of the relationship between a user and an organization.
UI Design
It’s a pleasure to welcome everybody to a completely redesigned, new age UTS on mobile app. The goal of improving the visual design and user experience is achieved. Have a look…
Looks Great? See all of the VISUALS HERE
Old Vs. New
Here’s a quick look at the Before & After images of UTS iOS- mobile app screens. Feel the difference!
Next Steps
It was my first ever app designing project! It was something New and Awesome for me. Every stage helped me to improve my skills. But as we all know, learning never stops.
I would be exploring other journeys in the future for this project.
Do reach out to me on LinkedIn or sanjeev.bawaskar@gmail.com for any feedback or suggestion.
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Stay Safe & Take Care!
