About Dutch Railways (NS)

The NS has a monopoly on the Dutch railways, which means that the organization also logically has the largest number of users. The main goal of the NS is to cater to their users needs in order to provide a perfect user experience. The NS has a well designed series of touchpoints featuring Web, Mobile and physical touchpoints. One of their main portals is the My NS website on which a customer can find everything regarding to their travel and travel history.
Via the My NS website customers can change your personal details, view travel details, make a change of address, subscribe to the NS newsletter or change your season ticket. They can also find information about your international travel in Mijn NS. This My NS webspace is quite complete in functionality but lacks contextual awareness of the traveler. This often leads to complaints and frustration.
During this project our team of junior designers explored how to create a better user experience on the My NS page, by focussing on contextual interactions.

My goal was to lead the team during their research and design process providing them with just-in-time workshops and mentorship to keep their process flowing.

The Brief

How can we optimize the My NS webspace by using smart data to match travellers' (travel)habits and wishes.

Challenges

This case is the pivot of the introductory course Interaction Design in which teams of junior designers must learn to understand and apply the basic skills and principles of the profession. Working for a real client and a serious case can be an overwhelming feeling for young designers.

My role is to guide the teams by providing them with the just-in-time knowledge and insights and to teach them to think three steps ahead as designers.

The Loop drives us

The heart of our design process is a set of behaviors focused on discovering users’ needs and envisioning a better future. We use the Loop. The Loop is a continuous cycle of observing, reflecting and making.

  • Observe to see what others look past. Take it all in with open eyes and ears to find out what’s important to your users and also see how your ideas hold up to their expectations.
  • Reflect to synthesize what you and your teammates have learned, articulate a point of view and come up with a plan.
  • Make to give concrete form to abstract ideas and turn intent into reality.

While you can start your journey anywhere on the Loop, we recommend beginning with reflection to form your intent. Then make or observe to open up the possibilities and continuously build on your understanding.

Gaining Insights

If research is the discipline of understanding the world, design is the discipline of shaping it. While research asks “what is?” design asks “what should be?”.

Teammembers started out by doing individual Design Studies. This provides a steep learning curve in the UX design techniques while generating a lot of user insights for the team.

Empathy mapping

Empathy begins with getting to know people as people, not just as users. By asking open-ended questions about how they live and work and by listening to their stories to understand their hopes, fears, and goals that motivate them. Better yet, by stepping in their shoes to absorb the highs, lows, and nuances of their lived experiences first-hand

Contextual inquiry

Whether it's identifying new opportunities or evaluating existing ideas, breakthrough ideas are born from a deep understanding of the real-world problems we’re solving for our users. This understanding isn’t gained by sitting at a desk or conference table. It’s gained by getting out of the building and meeting the users where they are.

UX Anatomy

Interactions can be seen as micro-moments. They are things that arise step by step from human actions and the state of our system. Interactions push our stories forward one by one: every button click, swipe, hover, or scroll helps us move further toward our goal.

UCD Canvas

UCDC was created out of need for an easy and effective tool facilitating user experience design process. Heavily based on user-centered approach and inspired by other great tools such as Business Model Canvas or Lean Canvas, the tool enables a comprehensive analysis of the user and the business main goals

Navigation & Flow

Through a series of cardsorting sessions and interviews we gain insight in the navigation and flow of the main tasks the website facilitates. This helps us to create a basic and understandable sitestructure and taskstructure which, combined with userinsights helps us to simplify the flow.

Design analysis

In a series of task and design analysis and quick prototypes we map out our first ideas and test them with our usergroep. Prototyping this early in the process helps to get our initial ideas out of our heads, share them with the team and thus create a shared vision and knowledge and an opportunity to fail fast.

Product soltion fit

Core UX

Products become meaningful when the solution matches the underlying problem. This solution describes how a problem will be solved. The problem-solution-fit thus describes the core user experience of the product.

Since all of the NS touchpoints are connected we know exactly which trains and trajectories our cutomers ride on at which times and how often, even it's a business travel or a private one.

The core UX of our solution to be about using this data to provide personal and relevant information for each person that uses My NS.

2 Strategies

1. Make it personal

A My NS space tracking your travel habits and providing personal information and advice based on these habits.

  • Gaining insights
  • Fully adaptable
  • Online and Mail
  • Personal Travel Advice

2. Make it green

Greenpoint is about contributing to a better and green planet by gaining insights in your NS footprint...

  • Stimulation for a CO2 free life
  • Green savings program
  • Cool rewards
  • Contribute to the green vision

Here's what we did...

We created a User Centered My NS space on which the user can gain insights in their travel history and can plan futere trips.

We have created a space where business travelers can generate and automate expense statements in a simple and insightful way.

In addition, giving travelers insight into their carbon footprint at all times, motivates them to choose public transport over their car.

Try it yourself...

Results

The prototype presentend to the NS gave new insights en ideas to the Dutch Railways about how smart and contextual aware interactions could improve their service and the overall user experience. The main goal here is to give the users the impression that NS is there for them and wants to make things easier by taking away the hassle of travel administration and planning an booking their trips. Our use of smart insights and the going green approach is currently being developed by NS and will launch early 2023.