We posted in early November about the upcoming launch of the new GNER website. Well, it's gone live, and the customer feedback is really fantastic.

But since the east coast main line franchise has now been awarded to National Express, the site has a new name: National Express East Coast. It's still the same user experience apart from that.

What's interesting is how this new brand will get a dramatic boost from the investment that GNER made in user experience.

Absolutely brilliant

The website's customer team is having a field day with positive feedback about the site. Here is a glowing example.

"Absolutely brilliant! Beautifully set out… it even let me CHOOSE MY OWN SEAT IN THE QUIET CARRIAGE! I'm going to call their web team (whose phone number is actually there on the site) to thank them in person. I've experienced so much utter rubbish from car rental and train sites in the past, you can't believe the relief I feel at the fact that someone out there is getting it right!"

The blogosphere is also responding positively. For example...

"By chance I stumbled onto GNER’s site. They have recently moved to their own custom-designed ticket sales system, and I must say they’ve done a very good job indeed. […] it shows a list of prices and a list of possible route-times. […] It also managed to find a great deal more routes than The Train Line did, in less time. And what’s more, you can of course buy tickets for any UK train from any UK train company.
In future, I’ll be buying all of my advance tickets online from GNER, as their website is much more intuitive than the others. Good work GNER!"

Good user experience builds brand

Did you see the customer switching loyalty to the new brand there? 'Course you did. Interacting with your organisation easily, efficiently and enjoyably means a lot to people. It was the quality of the user experience that made that switch happen.

The switch will happen again for a lot more customers. With word-of-mouth advertising like we've seen here, news will spread fast. The new National Express East Coast brand will benefit, arguably far more than from any advertising campaign. Customers will migrate to the new booking site from competitor sites, increasing revenue and generating opportunities for new customer relationships.

GNER and National Express East Coast were prepared to invest in user experience. It looks like the stats will show that investment was the right decision.

How to get these results for your organisation

The level of positive response that this website is getting is really remarkable, and especially so for a version 1.0. We got the result using a team of talented people and by following a user-centred design approach. Here's more about the techniques we used.

And the talent? A huge round of applause to the Flow and Splendid team who worked on this: Simon Hatch, Alejandra Obregon, Alistair Thomson (Splendid), Dan Morris (Splendid), Martina Schell, Karl Wortmann (Splendid), Kelsey Smith, Caroline Green and Ed Hastings-Evans (Splendid). The project director was Flow's director of user experience, Ian Worley.

And of course, congratulations and thanks to Atos Origin and TMW for top class development, coding and content integration.