thetrainline.com’s Iain Hildreth on User Experience

The last year has seen thetrainline.com making a big effort to solve online usability issues, including a research project with agency cxpartners and the relaunch of its site in September. Here, we speak to Iain Hildreth, the company’s director of marketing, about the challenges of making a complex booking service a smooth process for users.

- Can you give us a quick summary of how thetrainline has tried to improve the user experience in the last year?

At the back end of last year and the first quarter of this year, we took a step back, I guess, and looked at the website with new eyes. The site had been running since 1999. Not much had been done from a usability perspective, and with Web 2.0 happening, it was clearly time for us to look at the site.

We started off doing some usability research with cxpartners, including in-depth qualitative research and user goal interviews. We spent some time listening in at our call centres and speaking to customers and people behind the counters at train stations, and that was a really good way of getting inside the mind of people when they go about buying train tickets. We wanted to find out the mental model and map that they go through, and identify the key barriers they face to buying tickets online.

A whole bunch of things came out of the research, including the front end of how people search for tickets, and how they book them. For instance, if you are going to Bristol and buy a ticket to Bristol Temple Meads, you end up in the city centre. But if you buy a ticket to Bristol Parkway, you end up four miles outside. People were getting a bit frustrated with that. Now, within the search box, if you type in Bristol it comes up with both stations and tells you where they are.

We also looked into the purchase process itself, which is not as simple as you would imagine. There are lots of variables - different times, prices and types of tickets - and one of the things we are trying to improve the fare presentation page. We are not there yet and we have further improvements to make on this. From a usability perspective, it is a real challenge to put together.

The new site went live in September. It included a series of relatively small usability improvements which overall, have improved the experience for people. There wasn’t a silver bullet.

Associated Link: Full Q&A: thetrainline.com’s Iain Hildreth on user experience

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