Towards a worry-free bus journey
A UX case study on how we enabled bus live tracking and decreased customer calls by 60%
Nidhi, an IT Engineer in Bangalore is visiting her parents in Coimbatore over the long weekend. She decides to travel via bus this time for her overnight journey. She waits for her bus to arrive at the boarding stop — a desolated bus stand on the roadside. Let’s take a journey in a Nidhi’s head when her bus is delayed…
Goibibo is one of India’s leading online travel booking platforms. Travellers from all over India book flights, buses, trains, cars and hotels with us every day. As on the day of writing, we sell over 5000 bus tickets every day from our mobile apps (iOS and Android) and desktop.
We were receiving a lot of calls from customers like Nidhi who were facing issues with the location and status of the bus while waiting at their boarding points. At times, the boardings points lack the proper infrastructure and any on-the-spot help like inquiry counters.
Our data shows that 70% of our users board at night. Also, 70% of the users board their buses from small cities or towns (Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities).
User’s mental models for customer experiences span industries or services. From their past experiences of using cab services or getting food delivered, they expect to connect over call instantly in case of need. Not being able to call the conductor or the bus agency in case of the delay was a cause of huge dissatisfaction and anxiety among customers. Being kept on hold on the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) call at such times is the last thing one needs.
⏰ The need for contextual information and updates
Our high-level goals were —
- Providing real-time status updates of the bus leading to more transparency
- Reducing the load on our customer agents by providing the most asked information upfront
- Providing the contact details of the driver, conductor, or the bus company
🤔 Working towards the solution
1. Competitive Analysis
We started out by studying tracking features in other platforms like Redbus, MakeMyTrip and Uber. It proved to be a good anchor point to understand the existing user behavior patterns and their expectations.
2. Usecases
The final solution catered to different use cases depending upon the time from booking and constraints due to technical limitations.
2.1 Temporal Usecases
Information’s availability and its need for user changes depending upon where the user is in their journey. For eg.; Information like Bus number, contact number is not available till few hours before the journey starts.
2.2 Constraints
Unlike usual error cases, the technical constraints in this project emerged out to be major use cases. It was because of the variability in the available data and network outages during the trip. It became important to keep users informed on what is wrong.
3. Iterations
We explored the ways to show the information in — multiple cards, one card view like a table, cards with horizontal scroll. Each refinement with information hierarchy and visual elements like font sizes, colors and spacing moved us towards a better solution.
4. Aaand…The Final Solution
🥁 Outcome: Call reduction by 60%
The bus tracking feature has had a positive impact on the customer experience since launch. The calls from customers like Nidhi have reduced by 60% meaning users are able to find the information they are looking for — the location of the boarding point and bus, contact details of the bus conductor.
My Learnings
- In most of the projects that I have worked on in the past, error scenarios used to be just-another-screen. Working on this project gave me an understanding of how to handle technical constraints to empower the user stuck in such a situation.
- I learned how to leverage existing platforms instead of reinventing the wheels for similar features. Earlier, I felt this need to create something entirely new and adding my flair. I realized how counter-productive it was for a user to change their behaviour and expectations for all the apps
Thanks to Surbhi Bindlish and JDallcaps for the feedback! ✨
