UXD Translink website
As part of an RMIT Online User Experience Design course, I completed a project focusing on a tourist user flow on the Translink mobile website.
My hunch was: Tourists might have trouble finding out what card type they need and where to buy it because the homepage does not mention visitors and the visitors section (under fare types) is poorly laid out. The retail locations search function doesn’t work well for the tourist card types because they can only be purchased at the Airport.
In my comparison exercise I found that Victoria and ACT have similar user challenges, but Queensland is the worst offender.
The NSW Opal system is the most tourist friendly. There is only one card type to buy, or tourists can use a tap and go payment method and there are zero barriers to using public transport.
Key insights:
All users made a different journey through the site, however they all looked at the Find a Journey / Find Timetables widget first.
All users commented that the site was mainly intended for people who were already regular users.
All users commented that there seemed to be a lot of steps to get to a simple answer.
Recommendations:
Add a call to action for tourists on the home page.
Introduce a main menu option that clearly resonates with tourists and new users.
Use the top of the page for more obvious buttons and place more detailed information at the bottom.
I used the Crazy 8s method to generate ideas based on my user interview findings.
All of my users looked at the Find a Journey / Find Timetables widget first, so I decided to weight this as the least effort but highest impact option and proceed with this idea.
In my prototype, the Journey tab remains the default so that other user flows are not disrupted. The new tab lets people know that there are special tourist fares.
This solution reduces the steps to confirm that there are tourist cards available and that you should plan to buy one at the airport from 5 clicks to 2.
I tested my lo-fi prototype and made the following adjustments based on user feedback:
Removed copy on the second page as the buttons are descriptive enough.
Removed the image of the card type, as it is unnecessary.
Moved the list of where to buy the cards to the top of the page so that users know straight away that they will need to visit one of only a few retailers to complete this goal.
Test the interaction on figma here
For future development of this project I recommend:
Further testing with users who are already regular customers to ensure these changes don’t have a negative impact on the largest user group.
A UX copy writing review for all descriptions of tourists cards and how they work.