Booking train tickets online in the UK has always been a fiddly and tiring business. But in a couple of weeks, GNER will launch their new website and booking engine. We think it's the first of a new breed of easy, powerful, flexible travel booking applications. And we're proud to say that Flow designed the user experience.

The project is in a "live pilot" stage now and the feedback from the pilot groups is looking good. Here's a what a few UK railway fans are saying...

It's really quite powerful. It can be a very simple, clear 'cheapest fare available' system by clicking on lowest fare button... I'm quite impressed really.

Personally I think this site is a huge improvement on the The Trainline/ National Rail style sites. It makes it a breeze to find the cheapest fare / service combination. The user interface to me is much cleaner and easier to understand than the National Rail site.

Risky business

GNER saw they could gain competitive advantage by innovating a new kind of booking engine. Customers needed something more powerful, but also easier to use. But with any innovation comes risk: the chance that the market will reject the product or service.

To reduce the risk we to followed a user-centred design (UCD) process. We grounded design decisions in research and evaluation with over 100 target users right the way through the design process. We also worked collaboratively with Atos Origin, GNER and our favourite design agency Splendid, to make sure that user needs were balanced with technical and commercial requirements. Doing things this way gave us the insights we needed to develop break-through ideas. And it also made sure that the solutions we came up with really matched customer needs and business goals.

New ideas

We explored some different conceptual approaches including an interface that reflected the simplicity of the over-the-counter travel centre experience, or one that was more like a vending machine. But ultimately, the approach that worked best was to give the customers the control and freedom to select the tickets and trains themselves. Giving power and flexibility to your customers is a great way to gain their loyalty.

It may look simple, but finding and choosing the right train ticket is a complicated business. We all trade off factors like price, flexibility, arrival time and date every time we do it. We chose to use rich internet application technology (AJAX and DHTML) to make sure that customers got rapid feedback and a chance to experiment with different journey possibilities easily.

A simple benchmark: tickets to York

Throughout the design of the booking engine, we used a simple user experience benchmark to help us chart our progress. We asked people to find the cheapest ticket from London to York.

On the current site, feedback from this task was not very positive. People mostly failed to find the cheapest ticket that suited their requirements, took a long time and felt frustrated by the experience. On the final prototype of the site prior to build it was a different story. Just about everyone could quickly and easily find the cheap tickets, and people were extremely satisfied with the speed and ease of the design.

This kind of feedback gave management and the technical team confidence that the project would deliver a great result - before the code was ever written.

Mostly positive

Launching a new site is always controversial - you can't please everybody all of the time. But we're very satisfied by the feedback we're seeing from the pilot testers. And we're certain that UCD is the only way to deliver a new product to this high a standard on its first release.

As for the site, I really like it! [...] I found the cheap fares with ease using this site.

It doesn't force you to reserve a seat if you pick an open ticket. That alteration alone makes it a vast improvement...

I think the original Trainline matrix (with the single fares add-on) takes some beating, TBH. It [GNER] it's fine for people who will spend time learning it […] but it's too damn complicated for the end user.
-- Neil

I disagree. IMX most people are just after the cheapest fare and clicking on "low fare finder" and just selecting the best time/fare on the grid couldn't be simpler.
-- Philip