A current portal that doesn't reflect real usage
As with many situations we come across, the Nouvelle-Aquitaine transport portal today reflects a lot of the internal organisation of its departments. Users above all are looking for a simple and effective solution to access timetables, season tickets or practical information. As things stand, working in silos and the multiplication of sections by type of transport make the navigation confusing and time-consuming. Interviews with users make these frustrations clear. Whether they’re regular transport users, occasional travellers or looking for administrative information, they run into similar difficulties: trouble finding timetables, complexity in identifying the season ticket that fits their needs, no information about disruptions. Beyond the portal-specific usability issues, it’s the entire mobility experience that’s impacted.
Understanding the daily life of regional transport travellers
In response to these observations, we work with the Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine to address several objectives:
To get there, we run in-depth user research, combining interviews with operational staff, travellers from different contexts (urban, peri-urban, rural), and a large-scale online survey. Four typical user profiles are identified, each with specific expectations, but a shared need: fast, clear and intuitive access to the information and services on offer.
Improving the overall support for the user
Building on user feedback, the full set of journeys is mapped and reworked, from planning the trip through to the different steps that happen once the journey is done. An overall view that surfaces mismatches between the current offer and users’ expectations, especially in stressful situations: finding a fitting season ticket when you’ve just moved to the region, knowing what the rules are for taking the train with your bike, finding out in advance that next month my line will be impacted by works… The portal’s information architecture is fully reworked in collaboration with the operational teams. Rather than organising the content by type of transport (which has the effect of multiplying the same categories across the portal and losing the user), we structure the information around users’ needs: a single entry point for fares and season tickets, quick access right from the home page to the most used services, or a clear way to handle disruptions. This exercise also offers the chance to think about new solution directions, such as using SMS to flag the delay of a school bus, for instance.
A reorganisation built around services… but one that doesn’t sideline the editorial and marketing content. The goal here is not to remove that information, but really to offer guidance toward all the content available to the user. I want to travel from A to B, but nothing stops me from learning about the offers that let me travel across the region this summer, for instance. I sign my children up for the school transport while at the same time discovering that the region funds a large share of this type of mobility. That said, putting these solutions in place means taking many external factors into account: third-party tools and services used on the site (route planner, mapping…), issues tied to the mobility stakeholders, political strategies…
