Reducing queues at the NS ticket machine

Photo of the redesigned interface of the NS ticket machine.

Millions of travellers use the NS Dutch Railways ticket machines every month. NS wanted to decrease the amount of ticket machines on train stations and to reduce the queues in front of these machines. We were asked to make design improvements for its interface to reach these objectives.

Everything evolves around the traveller

The ticket machine is used by travellers to purchase printed train tickets and facilitates multiple options for the OV-chipkaart (contactless smart card system used for all public transport in the Netherlands). For this assignment we were asked to solely focus on improving the flow for buying printed train tickets.

We used our human-centred design approach in combination with the Design Thinking method to explore creative solutions and fine-tune them by prototyping, testing and learning.

We started out by getting our head around the usage of the ticket machines, this research consisted of:

• getting familiar with the product portfolio of NS, available via the machine;
• the technical limitations of the system’s hardware and software, to design feasible solutions;
• analysing data from the machines to understand what users purchase on the machines;
• observing and interviewing the users to get a better understanding what their needs are and which problems occur.

Prototyping towards our solution

With the gathered information and insights we started prototyping possible solutions with relevant internal NS stakeholders to accommodate the business needs and with travellers to provide insights from their needs. The different stakeholders were asked to design possible solutions via paper prototype sessions and to present their ideas. The outcomes of these sessions were used to feed our iterative design process for further exploration. That resulted into multiple prototypes for testing purposes with actual travellers.

“We managed to decrease the time to buy a single ride ticket with 30% thanks to the design improvements”

– Bas Zweeris, Product Owner Digital Strategy at Nederlandse Spoorwegen

Saving minutes when it counts

After small optimisations and positive test results we installed the updated design at selected ticket machines. This pilot ran for a few months before the new design was rolled out at all the train stations in the Netherlands with amazing results.

Prototype design for the new start screen.

The redesign of the start screen already saved precious seconds. The ticket machine is a typical walk-up-and-use system which needs to be self-explanatory that first-time or one-time users can use the system effectively without any training. To make some dramatic improvements we have changed the navigation with the most relevant options for the traveller and redesigned the buttons to make them more friendly to use.

Prototype design for buying a train ticket with pre-filled selection.

Once the destination was selected the most used choices were preselected for efficiency and offering the user to directly select their preferred payment option. We based this preset on the fact that 90% of the purchases had the same selected options (single ride, 2nd class and valid for today).

To service the other 10% we made it easy to make adjustments to their ride on the same screen. These optimised flows saved travellers minutes of time, dramatically shortening queues in front of the machines.

We were able to satisfy the needs of NS and its travellers by using our human-centred design approach. Interested what we can do for your business and users/clients? Contact us directly