Mara Kestrel Booking from February 2027

Transport · 2023

Northline fares

A fare finder that leads with the cheapest valid ticket and explains the rules in plain words.

Client
Northline Rail (sample client)
Role
Senior product designer (contract)
Team
A product manager, four engineers and a fares specialist
Duration
9 months
An empty railway platform at night with wet tracks and a yellow safety line
Photo: Brett Jordan / Unsplash

At a glance

  • +18%off-peak tickets bought
  • −27%refunds for the wrong ticket
  • 3.1 → 4.6app store rating

Results are sample figures for this fictional project.

The problem

Rail fares are a maze of restrictions. The old app listed every ticket type in a table and left the passenger to work out which one was valid and cheapest, often at the barrier with a train leaving.

Riding along

I travelled with passengers on their real journeys and asked them to buy tickets aloud. People knew where they were going and roughly when. What they could not decode was “SVR”, “OPR” and “valid via any permitted”.

A wall covered in hundreds of colourful sticky notes
Photo: Annie Vo / Unsplash
Fare rules rewritten as sentences, one sticky note each.

Lead with the answer

The new flow asks two questions, where and when, and then shows one answer first: the cheapest ticket valid for that trip, with its rules written as a sentence.

Faster or more flexible options sit underneath. Split tickets are offered when they save money, never forced, and a price promise refunds the difference if the app got it wrong.

  1. lead with the answer people came for
  2. rules in plain words, not fare codes
  3. offered, never forced
The fare result: the cheapest valid ticket first, with its rules in plain words.

Mara made our fares team explain every rule in one sentence. Some of them we then removed.

Head of digital, Northline (sample quote)

What changed

Off-peak ticket sales rose, refunds for the wrong ticket fell by about a quarter, and the app’s rating climbed from 3.1 to 4.6 within six months.

What I’d do differently

We designed for the confident traveller first. Passengers with disabilities, who often need specific services and assistance, should have been part of the first round of research, not the third.

Sample case study: the client, team, figures and quote are fictional.

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