National Express
Brand Identity, User Experience
5 months
National Express briefed us to strategically evaluate & unify the brand’s user interface across its core booking website. They also required a clear direction & a consistent digital styleguide that would steer all future UI design for the company, across multiple touchpoints.
Digital design system
User experience design
Journey planner
We studied existing analytical user data to inform decision making during the design process. Operating in an agile method, we designed & tested core templates & functionality with users across the website.
Using a mix of qualitative & quantitative data, we were able to study user behaviour & apply this insight into further updates across the main National Express website.
We kicked off the design process with a series of style tiles, quickly communicating multiple aesthetic approaches to the user interface. These included typography, colour palettes & various UI elements, without investing a lot of time designing multiple versions of page templates. After feedback from stakeholders, these style tiles were then developed into the final direction for the user interface.
The National Express team were open to an agreed level of social exposure for this project, through dribbble & Invision. This allowed us to obtain an additional input of opinions & recommendations from the global design community.
InVision also played a large part of the design process, allowing us to receive rapid feedback from multiple internal stakeholders and real users.
Analytics showed that content below the hero when users arrived on the homepage was hardly clicked, with all focus on users making a booking. Therefore we needed to ensure the journey planner was as dominant as possible, whilst allowing for campaign content to also be presented in the hero area.
As a result, National Express now have an online presence that is in sync with the NX brand, is customer-focused & in line with modern design and build standards.
The internal team now have a fully documented digital styleguide (with code) to reference, including UI elements, layouts & call to actions. This allows for future content, templates and features to be created consistently & on-brand.
We also introduced various small, yet important additions to the journey planner. These included clearer live & suggested search results, as well as the introduction of presenting popular destinations before a user even starts typing.
“Adaptable delivered a new look & feel that is flexible enough to be used across every one of our digital channels. As a digital content manager, this is absolutely amazing & makes my life so much easier.”
