Project Overview
IRCTC is India’s Largest Train Booking Service. It handles the catering, tourism, and online ticketing operations of the India Railways. With this project, the aim was to re-design the IRCTC website to reflect a clean, user friendly and minimal UI design.
Problem Statement
IRCTC runs more than 13000 passengers trains daily, from around 7500 stations across India. As per consumers of the website, the website is archaic and the overall user experience is not rewarding.
Scope
I worked on a project to redesign the railway tickets booking experience for passengers from India. Scope of this project was to present a clean and user-friendly design of the IRCTC booking website.
The research I conducted for this project had 3 goals.
Exploration: Better understand the habits, desires, and pain points of railway passengers.
Design: To design the login, registration, user account, ticket booking, and payment confirmation pages.
Validation: Validate the feature set, navigation prototype within the mock railway booking portal setup.
My Role
As a UX designer, I was responsible for,
Conducting user research, story-boarding, building information architecture and user flows
Sketching and Wire-framing
Low-fi, High-fi Prototyping
Creating final visual designs
Tools
Sketch, Invision and Adobe Illustrator
Research Setup
In-Context Interview
I interviewed five users while they were searching/booking tickets through the railway website.
I asked them lots of questions about what motivates them to book tickets through the website, their current solutions to navigate, and what their train commute looked like.
I also sent survey questions to 15-20 participants. The questions were merely focussed on the activities that goes before, after and during booking tickets.
2. Card Sorting
I created cards that were features I was considering for the website.
I asked participants to sort cards from most significant to least significant through the hybrid sorting technique. (I asked them to explain the reasons for their choice too.)
The reverse tree sort was helpful in understanding user flow for booking, cancelling tickets.
3.Prototyping
Visualizing and sketching the user interactions went along with prototype development, as it comes from user feedback during user testing & serves to guide later iterations.
Sketches and wireframes formed the basis for low, high fidelity prototypes at multiple stages to get perspective & test with users.
4. Usability Testing
Getting timely and useful feedback on prototyped ideas in a structured/informal setting is crucial to the iterative process.
The feedback from testing is what drives the iterative process, giving me essential insight into, refining the prototype, rethinking the interaction & even generating more concepts.
User Survey
Survey Results
Heuristics Analysis
How might I develop a more enticing online presence which better facilitates interaction between IRCTC website & its million visitors/day?
Empathy Mapping. Persona Creation.
Analyzing from what I learned during the user interviews, I modeled their experiences, tasks and mindsets to articulate the users goals & presented them as empathy maps and personas for quick, easy reference & guidance throughout the design process.
Personas
Empathy maps
Sketching
Storyboards
During In-context interviews, I documented the users’ thoughts, feelings, and actions by learning users’ motivation to
Book tickets,
How & when do they search for tickets,
Whom do they travel often with and
How frequently they travel.
I modeled their experiences, tasks, and mindsets to articulate the user’s goals & presented them as empathy maps and personas for quick, easy reference & guidance throughout the design process.
Information Architecture
Sketching. Wire-framing.
Crazy 8 Sprint method: The goal was to push beyond my first idea and generate a wide variety of solutions.
After discussing with five users, I decided on which of the eight sketches to prototype in order to validate the idea. I also worked on a Storyboard, where I mapped out each step of the experience that I planned to test. This also helped me decide on the pieces I needed to Prototype.
Home Page
Choose Train Class
Choose Number of Passengers
New Account Registration
Choose Train
Route Map
Passeger Booking Continuation
Pay and Confirm
Ticket Confirmation
Key Insights
1. Current Pain points
Users cannot search for tickets without logging in.
Users can book tickets only as a registered user.
The number of steps required to complete booking ought to be clearly defined.
No attractive placement of railway tour packages/images.
2. Sending Alerts
Receiving alerts/notification before traveling via text messages to passengers' mobile number was considered a beneficial feature.
3. Mobile App
Railway ticket reservations due to huge demands during weekends and holiday season are constantly searched. A mobile app enables passengers to search for tickets anytime, anywhere on their phones.