Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Arun Ganesh | arungraphy@gmail.com

Improving the Online Bus Ticket Booking Experience in India

Information and Interface Design | PGDPD
Guide: Manoj Neelkanthan
Sponsor: redBus.in, Bengaluru

Keywords
Online service
Bus travel
Ticket booking
Travellers

My project involved looking at the interaction patterns of how bus bookings are done online, and how the whole online booking experience can be improved. It sought to improve on how a customer chooses a bus service that can be trusted and bridge the information gap between his/her expectations from the travel and his/her actual experience. The primary target users were frequent bus travellers, students and also those who commute by train.

The design process was heavily research-based. A significant amount of time was put in to understand the psyche of bus travellers. A study was conducted into what customers who book online expect, pain points and their suggestions on how the whole experience may be improved. It was also necessary to understand how the private bus-operator industry functions and what happens behind the scenes. This was followed by creating target personas for the service and shortlisting features that were most relevant to the personas. An iterative design loop of creating prototypes and refining the interactions with target users helped to finally define the components and working of the system.

The final deliverables included comprehensive information architecture and detailed functional prototypes for primary interaction flows and user tasks.

Working in a start-up, in a business that affects thousands of daily bus travellers, was an extremely fulfilling experience for me. Learning the intricacies of the bus travel industry and balancing the needs of bus-operators, travellers and the client were both challenging and rewarding processes. I am happy that I was able to lay out a detailed framework for the client to implement new features, which could potentially revolutionize the future of bus travel in India.