Rail Commuter Assistant
Go Ahead Group | Design Lead | 2015
On Track is a suite of travel apps for Go Ahead's subsidiary rail operators — Southern Rail, Thameslink, South Eastern and Great Northern — offering customers easy mobile journey planning and handy contextual travel information.
During an update to make the apps transactional, allowing customer to purchase rail tickets natively, our product team wanted to go above and beyond the primary scope of the work. We set out to build a rail commuter assistant for watch OS and Android Wear during a one week sprint.
Day 1
As we know these days, smartwatch apps are all about context so we spent most of the first day camped at King’s Cross asking commuters for insights into their daily rail experience. It didn’t take long to learn that knowing your train’s departure platform before the rest of the hoards was the difference between reading the Evening Standard in a window seat, or being crammed like a sardine at the train doors. Now that’s valuable.
Day 2
How would we notify users of their train’s departure platform, at the right time, without them having to open the app and plan a journey? On Track users often saved their home/work journeys in the main app, so we had departure and arrival stations to work with and, using geolocation, we could send a timely notification as the user entered the station area.
Day 3
Sketching layouts, watch navigation patterns, locking down key information hierarchy and push notification messaging. Alongside this, we were testing geolocation in the office with iBeacons and syncing user’s saved journey data with the companion watch app.
Day 4
Next, from a design perspective, was exploring how to present the journey information on the small screen — a really interesting challenge! Not only that, but the Apple Watch screen is black (not white like your iPhone predominantly is) and Android Wear is white, so I had to think about colour use completely differently and sparingly across platforms. We were designing and dev’ing in parallel; things were heating up and we were having to figure out a lot of stuff on the fly as there were some discrepancies between how designs rendered in Sketch versus the devices, never mind the multiple form factors on Android!
Day 5
Testing, final design tweaks and demo time. Unfortunately, somewhere between day 3&4, the Android Wear app came off the tracks (so to speak!), so we were only able to fully demo the Apple Watch app. The demo was a big surprise to our clients and a testament to what a focused team clearly aligned around a user problem can achieve.