Redesigning a Transit Website for Faster Navigation; 30%+ performance
2023
Product Designer
Nearform
The Regional Transit District is Metro Denver's public transit system; offering bus, regional shuttles, lightrail, and commuter rail services to the Front Range.
RTD came to us with two goals: leave their existing CMS, and make it easier for customers to access schedules. Their existing CMS contract was expiring, and after 8 years on it, it was difficult to update.
The primary audience included both frequent and occasional transit users, so we couldn't rely on users learning through repeated use.
60% of RTD website visitors accessed the website from a mobile device – most often while en route to using an RTD service (bus, light rail, or commuter rail).
The existing RTD website had performance issues, was not optimized for mobile, and was difficult for staff to update–preventing critical notifications from being delivered to riders.
Their existing site buried key information for riders within unclear parent categories—schedules and ticket information under multiple layers of navigation, maps and station details were mixed in with details about project funding and construction updates.
We simplified the site's information architecture to ensure prominent access to scheduling and ticketing information.
We created a clear distinction between trip planning actions and information seeking actions, and the new information architecture reflected that in structure.
Using site analytics, competitive analysis, and user interviews, we identified the most visited paged associated with using the transit system and grouped them together.
The new website resulted in increased views per user (+40%), lower bounce rates (-15%), and increased site speed (+30%). A shiny, new CMS using Sanity, Cloudinary, and Vercel greatly improved operational efficiency for RTD staff, giving them a lightweight system with robust capabilities.
The team conducted a rapid discovery phase to understand the experience of RTD customers and staff. This phase included an information architecture audit, competitive analysis, interviews, and analysis of RTD's Google Analytics.
We observed that the best transit websites had prominent, easy access to trip planning, and schedules would often be available in the context of specific stations.
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Below is the legacy site navigation: the multiple levels and layers of navigation buried key information for riders. Service information and Schedule information did not live together, which made it difficult to know which services correlated to the schedule. Some links redirect users to RTD's NextRide app, creating additional friction and pathing for users to navigate.
We started by grouping information about specific services under a parent "Service" page. The legacy site had users digging within multiple levels of navigation to access information about services. Creating parent "Bus," 'Lightrail," etc pages allowed us to nest schedules specific to that service, directly under the service's parent page.
For website users, we had two distinct user groups: Habitual/Occasional Transit Users (riders) and Informational Users (transit enthusiasts, local governments). Below we can see the different types of questions these users might be asking themselves in regards to the RTD site. We created primary content zones for each user group to help them find what they're looking for as quickly as possible.
The biggest point of improvement for RTD content editors was creating template pages within the Sanity-based CMS.
We created a set of templates based on their existing content and needs discovered during stakeholder interviews. Template pages within the CMS allowed for content flexibility while maintaining a consistent design system.
I helped define which template pages were needed during the discovery process.
- Research and Discovery
- Defining Migration and Content Strategy
- Product Design
- Wireframing
- Visual Design
- Development Hand-off
