From blank page to an easy to use interface for Eurostar
Eurostar’s logo
Unlike its trains, Eurostar didn’t want a ticketing system on rails. It wanted to reinvent its internal booking tool to offer the speed, simplicity and flexibility expected by its customers. That required a complete redesign of the interface, applying the best in user experience design.
“I was very impressed with Sophie, there was no judgement, no criticism, it was all about sharing and building experience. I really liked that approach. I’ve learnt a lot through working with her. She is very specialised in her field, but she is still able to make that knowledge accessible. Her door is open for any type of question.”
-Mickaël Lelong, Customer Service Manager, Eurostar
Eurostar’s internal ticketing system had become the dictionary definition of ‘legacy software’, having been introduced in the late 1990s. “Over the years the system has been stretched to fit our ongoing sales needs,” explains Customer Service Manager, Mickaël Lelong. “I started 13 years ago and throughout that time we’ve been talking about updating it but changing your inventory system is a major decision and we’ve taken time to reach the right solution.”
The chief issues with the software were threefold. First was the ‘on rails’ command-driven nature of the system. “It led the agent to have a conversation a certain way which took away their freedom and flexibility,” says Ian Rickner, Eurostar’s Operational Performance Manager. “It wasn’t a very organic or natural conversation. It was designed around the restrictions that existed in the old inventory system rather than what customers need.”
The second problem was the complexity of learning the old system. “When I started, I had two months’ training to fully understand it,” recalls Mickaël. “Sometimes you had to type in lines of code to get it to deliver the ticket you wanted. Lots of people were rather reluctant to take a sales position when starting because of the system.”
Training times shortened, yet system issues remained. “It required a level of technical knowledge to deal with customers,” Mickaël confirms, “yet our focus should be on the customers, not IT.”
The third core issue was the reaction of customers to the antiquated system. “If you wanted a price you started with the customer name, then you would combine the fare bucket and fare type and then, at the end of the transaction you’d get a price,” Mickaël added. “Customers don’t expect that sort of system. Increasingly they are unwilling to provide names and emails before they’ve got some basic fare information, so you need lots of extra customer service skills to overcome the shortcomings of the system.”
More than merely a frustration, the software was impacting Eurostar’s customer service metrics. “If the system doesn’t enable the conversation to follow a natural flow you end up with call durations that don’t reflect what customers expect,” adds Ian. “For example, you know the train, you know the ticket you want but the system still forces you to follow a certain pathway. There is no shortcut.”
New Era
Eurostar’s new ticketing system is Voyager, which Ian describes as a “huge project changing the whole inventory that underpins how we operate. It will essentially change how the company prices and distributes its products.”
Detailing the interface the agents would see every day, Ian adds, “What we wanted was someone who could take a clean view, creating a platform that worked for staff and was an enabler that helped them do their jobs rather than blindly following a system’s demands.”
Building the case for UX
Previous to the 2018 UX phase of the project, Natalie Moser, Head of UX Design across Digital Channels, had already had her teams explore the experience of the brand when redeveloping the booking management section of the consumer facing website. But she also knew Voyager was not going to be a ‘pure’ UX endeavour. “[Voyager] was also a product ownership challenge,” Natalie reveals, adding that, in addition to UX expertise, she also needed someone “able to offer valuable product ownership/management support, helping to build the product in the right way, figuring out what success looked like and how to measure it.” That someone was UX designer Sophie Freiermuth.
The process
Sophie began with a three-month research period, interviewing internal users across Eurostar’s business in the UK and overseas.
“Sophie was really good at capturing the scenarios by going to the situation,” says Natalie. “She would be at Lille station at 5am to understand the specific challenges faced by the frontline staff at that time of the day. She’d get the full 360 on what matters to users and when.”
“Contextual enquiry was really important. She spotted opportunities when observing end-users interacting with the existing system. I think that was so essential to the project. Sometimes self-reported behaviours can be less effective than observed behaviours.”
“I spent a lot of time shadowing the sales team, conducting detailed user research to understand what customers need from both agents and tickets, and what agents need from both the interface and the system,” adds Sophie. “I wanted to know what people ask for, how they ask for it, what mental models do they apply when it comes to Eurostar? I needed all that information to start designing from a blank page a new interface that matched the business reality of Eurostar today.”
The research phase also included working with Eurostar project partners Sqills, providers of the solution, and Wavestone, implementation advisors, in order to design an integrated interface fitting the technical and commercial frameworks.
“When Sophie started working with us, the first thing people noticed was that she really made a point of talking to everyone,” recalls Mickaël. “From the first time I worked with her she was really clear that all users should have a say in the tools they would be expected to use.
As she developed new tools she would come and show what she’d been implementing according to the feedback.”
120 user interviews in 4 countries, 7 locations and in both English and French (the languages of the company) fed numerous iterations of the new design interface layout, enabling Sophie to understand the necessary user journeys, prioritise them taking into account content and technical framework rollouts, and begin to design flows and screens.
Sophie initially produced a small, dynamic prototype in English. Then she would add new features and functionalities each week before testing the new interface’s accuracy, commercial effectiveness (the ability to up- and cross-sell) and ability to improve interactions between agent and customer. “I rapidly realised I had to localise the prototype and test in the language and with the technical vocabulary of the agents, in order to get the most accurate insights,” she reveals. “Being a native French speaker really helped me design as well as research and gain the trust of station or call centre agents who sometimes felt very removed from headquarters.”
Commercially-mindful design
“What Sophie presented were tools that helped you,” explains Mickaël of his reaction to the interface Sophie designed. “You didn’t have to be a specialist with the tools to do the job. The first things we want to ask customers are ‘when do you want to travel?’ and ‘where do you want to go?’, and on the first screen of the new system, that’s now what we input.
“It’s what we need to hold a sales conversation. We can then make the choice with the customer and ask more questions to tailor the booking. The whole tool is designed round the natural flow of a conversation.”
Image: Search Results Page, prototype version.
Voyager was scheduled to launch in 2020. “It’s going to change the way we work in a multitude of ways,” enthuses Ian. “Training times are massively reduced. It’s so intuitive. The commands all make sense. The steps all fall into place. Everything is where you’d expect it to be.
“Transaction completion time is going to significantly reduce too. Our average transaction duration will reduce by about two thirds. Sophie has removed the irrelevancies, so that if a customer knows what they want, it’s very easy for [agents] to do that quickly and in a muchreduced number of steps.”
In addition to delivering elegant, validated designs, Sophie also ensured she shared her expertise with all team members in order to contribute to the success of the delivery and the implementation.
Ian continues “[Sophie] worked with me delivering presentations and ensuring people were engaged with what we were doing – so she wasn’t only supporting her own workstream; she worked with me on change management too.”
“The look and feel of what would be on the screen was the question that always came up when agents were getting project updates,” comments Sophie. “It was then natural I would help the Transformation team explain how the new interface was being designed and tested with agents from a blank page. My clients engage me not just to design, also to support the change in the organisation towards user-centricity, and to bring to the conversation the mechanics supporting design directions and decisions.”
“We don’t yet know the effect on staff recruitment and retention,” adds Mickaël, “but we have had feedback to say that people are no longer going to be scared of the system.
“We want to focus on customer interaction. Now, our people can be more attentive to the customer’s needs, something we perhaps could not be before because we had to concentrate so much on the system. That’s a big shift in the way we work.”
Working with Sophie
“I was very impressed with Sophie,” says Mickaël, enthusiastically. “There was no judgement, no criticism, it was all about sharing and building experience. I really liked that approach. I’ve learnt a lot through working with her. She is very specialised in her field, but she is still able to make that knowledge accessible. Her door is open for any type of question.
“Sophie is really rigorous, and she showed that when you have a clear, structured approach you achieve things. She is very pleasant to work with. A real team player, very enthusiastic about making the teams achieve their goals. She’s also really clear on her goals, values and ethics. That makes a world of difference.”
Ian agrees: “Sophie has been key in developing the system we are about to launch. Like many companies, some of our previous systems had been scoped by digital and [IT] teams and then presented to frontline staff beyond the point where we could influence them. This has been a complete reversal of that. Sophie’s built this system from the users up.”
“This was my first experience working on a project of this type, with somebody in Sophie’s capacity,” reveals Natalie. “What impressed me most about Sophie is that she’s extremely engaging. She forged effective relationships with all the stakeholders across the business. She really understood their needs, and absolutely did not drive it in one way. She developed solutions with the end user in mind based on the functionality they needed.
“She wasn’t precious about the solutions she developed. She was extremely open to going back and retesting. I was massively impressed. She’s a great personality to work with and she helped the project get off to its best possible start.”