T Express
Railway Ticketing App
Client: Taiwan High-Speed Rail
Platform: Android App
Skill: Interview, Wireframing, User Flow, Prototyping
Year: 2014
The Brief
T-Express is an Android app for booking Taiwan High Speed Rail tickets. It’s a 24 hour fully integrated ticketing system that allows users to book, purchase, cancel and pick up tickets. It even allows passengers to conveniently enter and exit the platform by scanning the QR code in the app. Our mission was to redesign the Android app to improve the user experience and adopt a new UI style that followed the Google Design Guideline (Android 4.0).
User Interview
We conducted several interviews with our company by inviting colleagues who used Android phones from different genders and age groups to perform specific tasks using the original app. We gathered several insights from the users’ feedbacks from the interviews:
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Users were often confused by the meaning of icons and wordings
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Users were unable to complete all the steps in the booking process
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Users were not clear how to complete the entire process from booking a ticket, purchasing a ticket, to collecting a ticket.
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Users were unfamiliar with the navigation logic and UI style which was translated from iOS.
Wireframing
Based on the user pain points gathered, we started sketching our ideas for designing the information architecture and main user flow for this project. The challenge we faced in this project was that no existing APIs would be altered, which gave us a limited room to improve the user experience when certain flows could not be improved due to the client’s strict conditions. For example, our client was concerned about network traffic to the server so they rejected our suggestion to show all train results on a single page when a user searches for trains by date. Also, we were not allowed to simplify some other complicated processes such as modifying tickets before paying or refunding after splitting tickets to others in order.
User flow
For the interface design, we chose ‘flat design’ with cards, which was trendy at that time with Android users. By using cards, we were able to separate information into smaller organized blocks, as well as prioritize important information we wanted the user to see. For example, in the payment page to separate payment information from ticket information we used cards to group ticket information and were able to direct user attention to payment information with different styling.
