Case study 3

Great Rail Journeys

About GRJ

"Great Rail journeys offer their customer escorted international tours and tailor-made breaks."

GRJ bring you the best in escorted holidays by rail across the globe. With an array of exciting destinations to choose from, a Great Rail Journeys tour takes inspiration from the 'Golden Age' of travel, transporting you by rail for a leisurely experience where the travelling becomes just the start of the adventure.

Summary of the project

AND digital were asked to put in a tender for GRJ by shining a light on the importance of customer centred design.

They needed to articulate a design vision for the future of GRJ. As a lead user experience designer, I was asked to pull together a series of designs (in a very short time frame) that could showcase our technical capabilities at AND, but also enhance the customer experience. The purpose was to simplify the process for the end user to conversion, but also to focus on the authoring experience. As always the narrative pitch would be on taking all of our assumptions, testing them with real users, and basing all of our design/team decisions on validated research.

Since a lot of the focus would be on authoring, our recommendation was to spend time with the teams, understanding their pain points and surfacing solutions that would remove any workarounds/frustrations.

My role

Lead user experience designer

Project timescale

1 week

GRJ website

The problem statement

1GRJ are looking to move to a new headless content management system to improve the authoring experience
2Data has proven that the number of customers who progress to successful conversion is disproportionate to the number of site visitors. (This requires both qualitative and quantitative research to understand)
3The visual design of the site, needs updated, but with a focus on usability and desired outcomes
4Authors of the site are manually updating content in numerous locations across the site. It was important that the design to showcase the authoring experience and get them thinking about their customers desired outcomes - rather than just an adaption of their online service

Suggested research methods include:

1User research, analysis and synthesis (including user & author interviews, diary studies and ethnographic research)
2Heuristic analysis of the site (Analytical data and insights team interviews)
3Alignment/strategy workshops
4Empathy mapping, archetypes, personas and service blueprinting
5Customer journey and experience mapping

Moodboards and design consideration

Wireframe mockups

Observations

I spent time looking at their site, understanding the existing user flows, categorisation and site structure. I was looking to understand their users mental models, and look for any areas that might block a users progress.

Observations

1The design had to be impressive on desktop and mobile devices. The hypothesis here is that by having a good mobile web experience, you provide more access to a wider audience
2There is a ‘quick’ usability improvement to be made to the top level navigation allowing users to visually scroll through the design rather than having to use the top level navigation
3Editorial content can be easily categorised and reused across the site. This would be well researched and based on user mental models
4Being able to measure the outcomes is also really important. We would be hoping to implement heat-mapping software for measuring quantitative data
5Another enhancement would be to introduce a drop-in day every week dedicated to understanding the needs of their customers. (Usability studies and casual customer interviews have been proven to enhance the customer experience exponentially)

Visual design solution

The solution

The solution is to build an exceptional front end experience for their customers, whilst ensuring the platform is easy to use for content authors. Of course this should all be substantiated through qualitative and quantitative research.

Considerations

1There are other third party integrations to be mindful of including booking engines, third party itinerary scheduling, and payment gateways
2Whilst this is dedicated to the online journey, it would be good to know how this fits in with the wider experience. Specifically around self service as an existing customer
3I would like to better understand the teams ways of working when it comes to authoring content. What works well and what can we make sure we keep as part of the process

The design vision would include:

●Full screen cinematic experience (images, videos and stories)
●Improved responsive design of the main website. Especially on mobile
●Visual representation of the major pages on the site including home page, editorial and landing pages
●Reusable interface, familiarisation, and consistency
●Allow users to traverse the categories and levels in a dynamic way

Fully responsive and accessible

Mobile friendly

Editorial pages

Reflection

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.””- Mark Twain

1The design solution is really just to set the vision and show an example our capabilities within AND digital
2My role was to do this for a short presentation
3More care and attention would be given to ensuring that the solution meets the needs of the customer through research and validation rather than assumption
4Given more time, I would have also liked to offer up other iterations of the design and further collaboration options