Renfe is the national railway company of Spain. They operate thousands of trains everyday and users all over the country navigate their website and app to search for train tickets.

the goal 🎯

For this exercise in an Ironhack event, our aim was to run a quick research of Renfe’s mobile app and finding its pain-points and weaknesses for a given user persona and study case. In only 2 hours we had to run the investigation and make a design proposal in 8 wireframes, everything individually.

We had to explain our solutions and show the navigation and interactions through the Marvel app. The goal of the exercise was to test our ability to run a quick UX research.

My role in this project was the one of a UX designer.

crafting the solution 💭

Given this study case, I analyzed the app’s usability through Miriam’s eyes and the pain-points started to appear:

Too many clicks (taps) needed to access the tickets purchase

Date selection picker obsolete, small and uncomfortable

Picker starts from beginning again when introducing return date

Search results only show exact times, not any next recommendation

Before the checkout process the app says a login is mandatory

Users must have an account and after logging in, all previously introduced data is lost

Dropdown lists are too small for users’ fingers

If a user makes a mistake, it should go back to change it

A card must have been added before check out (to do so, the app redirects users to their website in a long process!)

ID numbers of all passengers must be introduced in order to buy tickets

Dealing with these problems, I started drawing some ideas for the wireframes. Looking to successful competitors and remembering other user-friendly booking apps, I took their calendar pickers as a reference for my proposal.

The way results are shown is also important, so I took these examples as a reference, where users can constantly change their searching parameters (1), easily filter them (2) and watch them in different visual hierarchies.

final result ✨

The quick proposal of Marvel (now cleaned with a Sketch layer) shows a clear example of an easy ticket booking for users like Miriam. A purchase with no required login, easy date pickers and visual results’ screen would for sure improve people’s efficiency when planning their holidays and getaways.

Hope you enjoyed the project! You can check more below ;)