Expressway Case Study by Marino Software

Summary

The Expressway team wanted to focus on creating the best customer experience for their online and on-board service. They knew that jumping straight into development wasn’t the way to go.

We worked closely with their team to understand their customers' needs and visualise their future customer journey.

Through comprehensive user research we identified current pain points and we used ideation to turn these into opportunities that would not only improve the customer experience but also meet their business goals and drive revenue.

The Challenge

  • Achieve the best customer experience across both digital and physical channels.
  • Create operational efficiencies.
  • Drive revenue generation.
  • Understand coach users’ needs, wants, pains and behaviours to discover opportunities to improve the Expressway offering through digital channels.
  • Removing barriers to customers to ensure the Expressway brand is seen as leading and premium.

Services Covered

  • App, Website & Ticket Vending Machine (TVM) and on-board experience
  • Strategic Roadmap
  • User Research & Usability testing
  • UX Design & Design System
  • Development Planning

Our Action

Delivery Approach

To meet the goals of this project, we proposed a 3-part programme through a series of stakeholder workshops and user interviews to uncover opportunities, explore future state and create the design experience. This was then used to create a development plan to deliver on these. 

Understanding the opportunity

Through a number of online workshops, the team mapped the current journey, gained insights from user research, built up customer personas, uncovered opportunities and explored ideas on how to solve pain points and create a future service blueprint. The output informed a clear roadmap of activities to deliver on both customer and business needs.

Personas user research examples

Gaining insights fast

The team were able to gain insights from real users that were set a task of booking travel using remote research tools. The team also interviewed users directly and obtained quantitative feedback through a survey.

Research process steps

Highlights from the research showed the challenges that users had like switching between applications such as Google Maps to complete their journey booking. Easy access to information is critical to ensuring a good user experience.

Collecting, analysing and translating research & data into highlights, patterns, and insights led us to some key insights for each journey stage. All the insights were explored and used as input to the future service blueprint.

Organised notes and insights into user journey map

Results

Product Roadmap

The team worked on identifying key roadmap items, prioritising them on impact & effort allowing us to create a roadmap of immediate (MVP), Near term and Future items.

The roadmap items aren’t exclusive to the digital service but cross the end to end journey considering operational processes, marketing campaigns and commercial opportunities.

“Marino redesigned and optimised every stage of our ticket buying experience. What’s more, they’ve created a roadmap for the future of our business that builds on the world-class customer experience they’ve already delivered”

Andrew Yates, Ancillary Revenue Manager at Bus Eireann

Design System

The design system was created to give a full “kit of parts” or components to be used to develop any digital channel going forward. It ensures consistency across all channels, and allows you to rapidly design and prototype new features.

The design system was created to give a full “kit of parts” or components to be used to develop any digital channel going forward. It ensures consistency across all channels, and allows you to rapidly design and prototype new features.

Creating the experience

Using the future service blueprint and best design practice, we created a prototype of the app and web journey.

Expressway user interface first iterations by Marino Software

Service design - Designing the on-board experience

To create a great experience, you have to take a holistic view of the overall customer journey, not just focus on the digital part. We worked with Expressway to map out their end-to-end service, capturing all interactions, systems and processes.

We carried out contextual user research with real coach users to understand the high and lows of their experience. This helped us to identify what areas to focus on. Whether it was processes, systems or people. Then we looked at how we could improve the digital channels to address these.

Expressway user research in-person and service design

Physical touchpoint redesign of Ticket Vending Machines (TVM)

During the project, we were asked to look at ways the ticket vending machines could engage customers more clearly and concisely while still meeting business goals.

We wanted a consistent look and feel to the interface and this was achieved by developing our design system to include the ticket user interface components.

Physical touchpoint redesign of Ticket Vending Machines (TVM) screens

Development plan with AWS

Our approach was to devise the best technical architecture, support the best customer experience and provide the foundation on which digital channels could be extended in the future. For this purpose, we proposed a serverless architecture for the development of the system, based on the AWS Well-Architected program.

Our plan was to enable easy integration of 3rd parties going forward and make it easy to extend the platform for wider use within the group, not only for Expressway.

The MVP prototype was used as the basis of the development plan to deliver on cost and timelines.

Next steps

We have proposed a development plan to deliver on Expressway goals.
A plan we can progress together in partnership, delivering on what’s required today but also in the future.

As well as providing ongoing support for the delivered system, we will continue to shape this roadmap, prioritising features based on real customer feedback while exploring the future of coach transport with future-thinking workshops.

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