Rail Europe

Rail Europe has been a leader in European travel for more than 75 years, and is the largest distributor of European rail products in North America. Their mission is to encourage train travel as part of every European travel experience, and they provide tools for individuals and groups to plan and book trips.

Rail Europe believes train travel enhances the visitors experience as they navigate their way through Europe, and they approached BusinessOnLine with the task of enhancing their website visitor’s experience as they navigated their way through Rail Europe’s online planning and booking engines.

Situation:

Rail Europe is a travel site that helps vacationers and business travelers see a different side of Europe – discovered uniquely through train travel. They offer a wide range of product choice to suit every traveler, and every budget. 

Rail Europe is ISO 9001-2000 certified, which is a recognized worldwide Quality Management System standard based on well-documented and analyzed processes and procedures that focus on Customer Satisfaction and Continual Improvement. As such, they wanted to ensure consistence on their website, and contacted BusinessOnLine to assist with the creation of a web standards guide to include SEO, usability, and coding standards for their internal web development team.

While creating the portion of the web standards guide relating to usability, BusinessOnLine uncovered a need for a more detailed understanding of the various site-users as well as their attitudes, desires, and expectations. This discovery lead to a multi-phased solution for understanding their audience and building a website that addressed the needs of the various user-types visiting http://www.raileurope.com/ for information and to book tickets for their European adventures.

Solution:

Phase 1: Persona Development  

Rail Europe provided BusinessOnLine with already developed audience profiles. BusinessOnLine then expanded upon these profiles to create Personas. A Persona is a user archetype that drives the design and interface of a website. Creating a Persona involves a practical application of science, customer research, psychology, and customer empathy. The result must embody customers’ divergent segments of motivations, needs, and preferences.

BusinessOnLine developed three distinct personas for Rail Europe in line with what was determined to be the three primary motivations to purchase. They were: Catherine the Overly Organized, Robert the Romantic, and Aang the Uninformed.

By creating this set of personas with rich details on the lives, hobbies, and attitudes of each, the personas seemed like real people to the Rail Europe development team and enabled them to understand and focus on a set of target users. Designing for personas is the only way to properly construct navigational paths that lead your customers to what they seek, and persuade them toward conversion.

Audience Profiles and Personas helped to determine what questions and needs these targets may have when coming to the site. BusinessOnLine used this understanding to guide content, organization, and navigational decisions – ensuring that Rail Europe provided the right amount of content, highlighted the most desirable information, and organized everything in an easy-to-find manner.

Phase 2: Internal Audit and Education Session

BusinessOnLine conducted a collaborative session with individuals from various departments at Rail Europe to assist them in understanding their target audience.  Essentially this was an education session to discuss the internal perception of what their audience was, and the reality of who their audience is. The net result of this session was a top-down education on the unique perspectives and needs of the various users, and the importance of taking these users into consideration in everything Rail Europe does. This session also included a brainstorming session about the organization of content and site features.

Phase 3: Site Maps and Wire Frames (IA)

Site maps are a hierarchical inventory of all the pages that live on a website and the connection between each. This comprehensive document allows a high-level view of the main and sub-categories of information to make sure it is organized in such a way to satisfy the needs and expectation of the various personas.

Once developed, BusinessOnLine tested the proposed site maps through card-sorting. Sophisticated software enables users to organize data that will appear on the site into categories and then assign labels to each category. User-categorization and label selections are then summarized and used to validate the intuitiveness of the site map.

From there, BusinessOnLine developed wire frames, or visual representation of the elements that will reside on each page and the expected location of each element. Wire frames blend the constraints of personas and usability best-practices with SEO considerations and common sense to create a blue print of the site.

To test the effectiveness of the wireframes, BusinessOnLine conducted two types of user-testing. First, BusinessOnLine tested the proposed functionally as well as user’s content expectations based on navigational labels. This process validated the navigational labels, relevancy of content, functionality, and overall organization before design.

Once design was complete, BusinessOnLine conducted another series of user-tests called visual affordance testing to ensure visual clues gave off the correct meaning to users.

Results:

Understanding their audience was essential to providing the information, tools, and products they sought. It is a critical component of any customer-centric website, and BusinessOnLine worked with Rail Europe to optimize the user-experience of their existing site by incorporating functionality to suit their target’s needs.

Organizational Results

• Facilitated education of internal teams regarding their audience personas.
• Communicated the implications and uses of this information throughout the organization and worked with executive team to create a shared vision.
• Evaluated and recommended a content management system (CMS) flexible and scalable enough to meet the needs of Rail Europe now, and in the future.

User Experience Results

• Enhanced functionality to meet the search preferences of various types of travelers, including multi-faceted search capabilities which enable visitors to refine their search by a variety of factors, including: lowest fare, time of day, last train of the day, etc.
• Customer-Centric Information Architecture for various sites including Rail Europe booking engine, trip designer, and their main site.
• 36% more visitors "Would Certainly Recommend" site to a friend or family member.
• 25% more visitors ranked site as "One of the Best Travel Websites" to use.
• 41% of visitors found the site "Easier to Use" than before.

About Rail Europe Group

Rail Europe is the largest distributor of European rail products in North America – encouraging train travel as part of every European travel experience. The company celebrates over 75 years as a leader in European travel and believes that the spirit of train travel is about enjoying the simple pleasures, respecting the environment, and connecting with people, places and cultures.