Do you still not know BlaBlaBus?

How to start by re-designing and almost ending up changing the whole business model…

The Challenge

The challenge was to select a mobility company, and analyze:

• How users book a trip or buy a ticket
• Improve one task based on the research

Where to start

Main areas of research

Where every UX project should: researching! As we only had a week and half to do so we concentrated on the following areas:

Step 1: What is the company’s mission with BlaBlaBus?

For us that knew BlaBlaCar from before, you immediately think: BlaBlaBus must be similar to the car experience but in a bus, but reality is that the company was initially conceived to do very cheap trips between european cities.

Knowing that it was meant as a conventional bus company, we jumped into step 2 of our research:

Step 2: Analyze main competitors and platforms.

This is important because you want to deeply understand how are others selling their products, but mainly, which parts of the user experience is our user going to be used to when buying a bus ticket.

Compared to its main competitor (see image above), BlaBlaBus is cheaper, but the platform is less intuitive, the product less known and it has a lot of competitors.

Step 3: Quantitative Analysis

Up until this point we only have hypothesis, so we decide to dig a little deeper and see what users, that actually know the platform and product think of it, and results are devastating:

From 577 users, 68% evaluates BlaBlaBus as “very bad”.

Step 4: Heuristics Analysis

Heuristics Analysis

Having seen this, we decide to conduct our own Heuristic Analysis, identifying problems in key areas such us:

• User control & freedom: there is no way to know when there is the next available date for the selected destination, making the user check day by day.
• Consistency & Standards: unlike common bus platforms, there is no possibility to filter, to select return trip, to scroll down through different destinations…
• Error prevention: if there is no available trips, the user should be warned from the beginning, and not have to navigate for ages until he discovers that same information.
• Help & Documentation: being a new product, there is no FAQ’s, the same way the do have them for BlaBlaCar.
• Aesthetic & Minimalistic design: there is three designs for the same purpose of searching for a bus ticket within the same platform.

First Hypotheses

Having completed this initial part of the research, we feel confident enough to define a user persona:

Carolina, who is 22 years old, has just finished university and wants to go traveling around Europe with a very reduced budget. As she travels alone, and already know BlaBlaCar, she will be interested in BlaBlaBus, and specially, in the social aspect she is going to expect from it. Meaning:

1. Possibility of meeting new people with similar interests

2. Checking their profiles online (like you can do in a BlaBlaCar trip)

3. Making new friends

User Persona Empathy Map

Having Carolina in mind, we decide to dig a little deeper in our research, so we conduct a series of interviews with two main goals:

1. Finding out how users perceive trips by bus
2. If users know & like the idea of BlaBlaBus

Results are the following:

But we concentrate in two of these:

100% consider bus trips to bee too long, specially when talking about long distances between european cities.

100% users though, are interested in bus trips when they are part of the experience of travelling.

And what do they mean by “part of the experience”?

They mean that a bus trip is tedious when it’s just means for an end, but when the trip itself starts in the bus, because you are going with your trekking group to the mountains, or with a group of friends to visit a winery… then it’s actually fun!

That why we make this simple equation:

TRAVELING BY BUS = AN EXPERIENCE

So basically we rethink the whole purpose of BlaBlaBus and decide that the user experience, should be all about what we are seeing the user is expecting to receive, and the appreciation that a trip doesn’t necessarily start when you arrive to your final destination, but it can actually start with the trip itself and base our whole re-design, in this idea:

Traveling doesn’t begin when arriving to your destination, traveling begins with the trip itself.

This new proposal has a main purpose:

To offer to the user the option of “publish a trip” that already exists in BlaBlaCar, but for BlaBlaBus, baring in mind in this case the bus & driver are provided by the company.

With three main objectives that will materialize in a first lo-fi prototype to iterate:

1. To implement an option that users that haven’t used BlaBlaBus already expect to have within the product.

2. To include in this user experience the concept of “online community” which is the way Carolina, our users persona, interacts with others.

3. That users complete successfully: the task of publishing a trip by bus

The first prototype

When creating the first prototype there is one thing clear: we have to create a process of booking a bus ticket that’s quite conventional, because it’s what the user is used to, but we have to implement key ideas that we obtained from our research and that can be understood under the same global idea:

As Carolina is organizing her trip from and to where she wants, she decides:

1. Is it a public trip or a private one? Either everyone can join the trip or she creates an invitation just for her friends
2. Do you want to travel with users with a similar profile to yours? Activate NEARBY function and discover with who you share common interests and organize a trip together.
3. Are you too many to travel by car to that mountain trip but not enough to fill a whole bus? Chose the size of bus within BlaBlaBus that adapts to your group size.
4. You won’t have to pay the full reservation for everyone: share your trip with the rest of the participants, and let everybody pay their own ticket.

Our findings with the first prototype & iterations

We did two iterations and with each of them solved multiple pain points. The main ones we corrected were that:

1. 100% users wanted to change the pick up location for their return, baring in mind they are thinking of trips such as going for a mountain walk, so they understand the route begins on one place, and ends on a different one.
2. 80% of users perceived the process a bit too long: too many steps to achieve the final goal.

Diagram of process followed and how pain points reduce with each iteration

But to better understand where most users where having trouble, we did a customer journey and saw in which screens there was a bigger tendency to experience problems:

Customer Journey and pain points experienced by users

Final conclusions

As this was only a short project, we didn’t evolve into a third iteration, but we concluded what our main problems were, and how to solve them:

1. Process is too long: too many options user is not interested in
2. Not paying creates insecurity: user is not sure if he has booked the bus or not and is used to paying a reservation at least.
3. In step 9, we inform user of booking conditions and they feel punished: this should be included at the beginning of the process.
4. User doesn’t wan’t to customize too much their trip, just to book it.

Just as a final challenge…

Try saying BLABLABUS 5 times really fast without making a mistake ;)

Hope you have enjoyed this case study! And thanks for reading!