National Express
Brand Identity, User Experience
5 months
National Express worked with us to strategically evaluate and unify the brand’s user interface across its core booking website. They also required a clear direction and a consistent digital design system that would steer all future UI for the brand, across multiple touchpoints.
Digital design system
User experience design
Journey planner
We analysed existing user data to inform decision-making during the design process. Adopting an agile approach, we designed and tested core templates and functionality with users across the website.
Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, we were able to study user behaviour and apply this insight to 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 and 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 promotion for this project, through dribbble and InvVision. This allowed us to obtain the additional input of opinions and 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 and in line with modern design and build standards.
The internal team now have a fully documented digital design system (with code) to reference, including UI elements, layouts and 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 and 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.”
