Trainline

When it comes to travelling by train and booking, we all know what name comes to our mind - Trainline!An amazing app, butter smooth experience and of course safe as well during COVID-19 times, as it saves you the hassle of going to the ticket counter and getting in touch with more people.

Trainline is a great app to use for those travelling often. They made it quick and easy for you to travel across the UK and the rest of Europe by rail and road. You book great value tickets for Avanti West Coast, GWR, LNER, National Express and more. You can even plan your international trips by train or bus across 45 countries in Europe and the rest of the world.

They have other useful features like; live train times, price alerts, Mobile Tickets/e-tickets and seat selection.

But what if Trainline app had more to it?

By saying more, I mean more convenience and time saving than it already has to offer! During my journey's to London - I discovered one thing about Trainline, if you don't have a pass issued by your train provider, you will need to book tickets and get through machines each time - which is a waste of time and paper!

During my recent work on Trainline concept - I thought to bring some other parts of experience to it such a much cleaner way to represent departing trains from your currently set station or location based station with an ability to change it.

Current App

Undoubtedly a great app with a very decent UI. However, the problems highlighted in red are the ones I would improve here and turn this into a much simpler and easy new booking flow.

With the new booking flow, there is no need for an overwhelming amount of information to be filled on the same page. In fact, we ask the information wherever it is relevant and in more clean and collected way.

Redesigning

I kept a few things in mind while redesigning for train-line; simplicity, convenience and user friendliness.  As looking at 'user profiles' a typical user will be rushing to work or school with less time, running around and having maybe bags and folders in their hands. This shows we will need to keep it as simple as possible.

Hence I made sure to tidy up the booking flow:

• There is a much more simplistic approach to the live departure board - that is in a block structure to simplify necessary information that the user needs into one block.
• A clean layout was always on my mind for this app - as I felt very overwhelmed with the many elements that I had to choose from - especially with the 'use case' that we have - it needs to be less confusing so that they can tap options much more faster and smoother.
• Similarly choosing dates should be easy and not confusing with the default IOS scroller. It is much more easier to pick dates when it is displayed all across the screen where our user can see it and click for the dates much more faster. I decided to not add any timings with it - as I discovered that train-line will show you all the timings for the journeys on the next page.
• Now there is a clean layout for customising your journey; the type of journey, seating type and adding rail cards etc all being done in one block without having to tap several times.

Solution

Here is a full board of re designed Trainline App. In this solution, I have tried to make it even simpler for the user to book their train journey. A clear layout of important questions to generate a ticket options.

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Conclusion

As stated above, my main focus was here to make it even quicker for the user to view their ticket options and book a journey. Using a vertical date selection slider with an option to open a full view calendar, using a block approach for asking - takes away the need to filling this information in a default iOS style (as in the current app). More work to follow up on this soon. Stay tuned :) 

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