Summary

The AMTRAK Website Redesign aims to enhance the website’s current user experience and interface, streamlining the ticket booking process as well as the process of viewing train routes and schedules.

TIMELINE

October - November (6 weeks)

AMTRAK’s website is overwhelmingly frustrating to use

After hearing consistent feedback from friends and others about the frustrating user experience on AMTRAK's website, I recognized an opportunity for improvement. I aimed to explore and address the pain points users encountered, seeking ways to enhance the website's usability and overall user satisfaction.

Travelers who are flexible have trouble being flexible

I wanted to do some initial research on online forums about Amtrak to find out what problems people were having on the website and who the main users were. I discovered that users are made of two groups of people: those who book tickets based on a specific destination and dates, and those who have flexible schedules. The latter had woes about:

• the difficulty of viewing the schedules of the trains and arranging their schedules based off of that

• the absence of train route/schedule information, without realizing its existence

Users book tickets for specific dates and have trouble selecting seats during the process

I conducted a survey with 9 participants who have used the Amtrak website.

Sample Questions

• What are your objectives using the Amtrak website?

• What difficulties did you have using the website in the past/currently?

• What do you like and dislike about the website? What would you want to see included or changed?

Interestingly enough, none of my users viewed the general schedule for their route or destination, perhaps due to the fact that they were readily available during their travel dates. I had no insight on the schedule info process, so I decided to run a tree test with 6 users on Amtrak’s current website to identify navigation issues for it.

This result surprised me, but it led me to believe that finding schedule information was not a matter of intuitive navigation issues or unclear labelling, but rather that the schedule tab is not easily noticeable.

I then performed user testing on the usability of the Amtrak website by having people who haven’t used the website before perform tasks, along with the results:

REVISED/NEW PROBLEM STATEMENT

How can we have Amtrak users more easily navigate to book tickets for a specific trip or access route/schedule information?

Click image to enlarge

TASK FLOWS

Developing task flows for the users

After redefining the problem through this stage of research and narrowing the scope of the users, I developed task flows. I focused on improving the ticket booking flow from my research insights, breaking down the steps into more detailed actions and screens.

I also designed the task flow for viewing routes/schedules for the new button/option I added to the landing screen.

TESTING AND IMPROVEMENTS

3 notable design improvements

After further cycles of testing with some old and some new users, I made iterative improvements based on their feedback:

FINAL TESTING

Testing effectiveness of final solution

Once I entered the final stages of prototyping, I tested the time it took for users to accomplish the same tasks from initial stages of testing to quantify how effective my solution was.

Final Prototype

REFLECTIONS

Afterthoughts + Things I learned

1. Embrace change fearlessly. Within my early iterations, I initially hesitated to ask for feedback on simple changes - such as making text more bold or moving the position of an element infinitesimally - to my users. Even if you think such a small change won’t make a difference, another pair of eyes may think it actually has lots of value in it - much more than you think.

2. Start off prioritizing breadth over depth. It can be easy to just tunnel vision and build off of a singular design. However, I found value in building multiple different designs at once, then combining the best parts of each into a single iteration. Then, after continuously refining, the final designs clarify what works and what doesn’t.

3. Dive into emotions during testing/interviews. Although task completion is insightful, a large part of the emotional experience is left out. Beyond task-related feedback, ask follow-up questions about users' feelings regarding interactions and design elements for valuable insights for iteration and improvement.

After my usability testing, I analyzed Amtrak’s direct and indirect competitors, as well as similar non-domestic transportation booking sites to learn how their landing page, navigation, and booking processes are visually and functionally structured and find insights on what usability improvements could be made.