In 2022, International high speed rail operator Eurostar was merging with another carrier at the same time as a major rebrand.
I worked on UX, UI, IA, Interaction and Visual Design briefs, across the ticket booking system, navigation and rebranded page templates.
Over 8 months, I worked on UX, UI, IA, Interaction and Visual Design briefs, across the ticket booking system, navigation and rebranded page templates.
Results were:
Brief I
I
Eurostar holds a prominent position in the European train market, facilitating efficient travel between major cities such as London, Paris, and Brussels. It competes directly with airlines, presenting a more eco-friendly and frequently faster alternative.
Eurostar's operational success relies on international cooperation, yet it contends with competition from a variety of transportation modes.
Twelve Eurostar customers were interviewed, and a variety of challenges emerged in their experiences with the booking process.
Customers faced difficulties when searching for trains, booking tickets, and adding extra services to their reservations.
Moreover, managing bookings post-purchase posed additional hurdles.
These mixed experiences underscored the need for Eurostar to address these issues, emphasising the importance of streamlining the online platform for easier navigation, efficient booking, and improved post-booking support to enhance overall customer satisfaction.
II
Two personas named Anna and Markus were created to empathise with a broader range of customers' needs and perspectives.
The personas represented a distinct variation of customer, helping us understand behaviours, motivations, pain points, and aspirations.
With these personas as a guide, User Journey maps were created, detailing the experience of deciding to travel, researching options, choosing tickets, paying, receiving information and managing the booking.
UX Fun Fact
Eurostar and OxfordSM consultants pioneered the first Customer Journey Map in 1998, as part of establishing and implementing a corporate mission and brand proposition.
III
With a better focus on the problems that needed solving, I turned to sketching as a fast and easy method of thrashing out options for UI, as well as mapping out alternatives for the user flow and other ideas.
User flows were created to get a clear understanding of the steps involved in choosing tickets, choosing extras and then paying.
Different flows were needed to understand the differences in booking trains, hotels or a combination.
IV
Lots of early development work went into exploring different possibilities for the UI, in particular for search result rows and fare types. Features that were designed or improved:
A high-fidelity prototype was put together from the new designs and a group of 8 subjects were recruited for testing online. These subjects all had some familiarity with booking trains but represented a broad spectrum of customer, with different backgrounds, ages and incomes.
The test results were broadly positive, with subjects all generally able to navigate the process smoothly, from scanning train timetables to selecting a train, understanding fare classes, choosing seats, adding extras, logging in, and making payments.
Minor usability issues such as changing tickets and accessing the cart were identified and addressed in the final designs.
V
The designs were completed after several rounds of testing and are now live.
Along with the rest of the site, the ticket buying flow was also re-skinned with the new Eurostar brand, which is ready to launch in September 2023.
The new improved end-to-end ticket booking flow design was responsible for:
Brief II
I started with competitive research and analysis understand how we might better integrate booking engine UI with the navigation. I wanted the booking functionality to be easily accessed from any page.
To avoid clashing with the navigation, I tried positioning the booking engine just above the fold on desktop. However this soon became problematic when it came to scaling for different screen sizes.
A new site map helped with restructuring the site content and prioritised what would appear in the main navigation.
In retrospect, the solution was quite simple. Some probing uncovered that the links in the main nav were largely included for SEO purposes, and so could be safely repositioned to share the same tabs as the booking magnet.
This allowed a horizontal layout that could be integrated with the navigation, to allow easy access from any page.
This restructure necessitated a redesign of the navigation and menus. On mobile I used a side-to-side navigation, to replace the janky accordions. The designs were also restyled to fit the new brand.
The new integrated booking engine was successfully tested with users and the new design will launch with the rest of the site rebrand in September 2023.
Brief III
I began with gaining an understanding of the new brand, which was inspired by sparking adventure, travel and excitement. Research and benchmarking against other travel/luxury brands helped align the new look.
Early efforts involved pushing the limits of angled typography and the loud colour palette. The brand team were keen to feature the new brand symbol, known as The Spark, as much as possible.
Unfortunately, The Spark didn’t easily lend itself to the spatial restrictions of the screen and needed some clever positioning.
This led to experimenting with image cropping and the use of angled page sections, in order to keep some of the sparky dynamism.
The new look evolved over many iterations, discussions with the branding team and stakeholders including the CEO.
Along with integrating the booking engine, a particular challenge on the landing page was the need to allow flexibility for a variety of marketing promotions and imagery. The headline needed to accommodate long or short messages in all European languages, and of course, The Spark also needed some presence.
One of several templates designed to showcase both the brand and the holiday travel destinations with flair and excitement.
Content page templates that contained all of the practical information needed by passengers ahead of their journey.
When my designs had been completed and signed off by the brand team, I began creating components to be used as part of a Figma component library. Colour was a big part of the new brand and the team were keen to allow the content editors a broad palette in the CMS. This added to the complexity of the component variants.
The new page template components were part of an overhaul of the Eurostar design system. Over 6 months, our team constructed a new system, which we documented and handed over to developers as we went along. I have written a seperate case study about this project:
Design System Case Study
I enjoyed my time at Eurostar and am pleased to have contributed to some great design projects.
I learned much about the considerations and complexities of booking travel tickets, as well as refined a few stakeholder management skills as part of bringing a fresh new brand to market.
