Case Study

Toll Road Services for the Masses

The largest tolling highway in North America moves their services to mobile after decades spent shipping monthly invoices to their users through the traditional physical mail channel.

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Project Overview

407 ETR approached us to help them take their existing mail based service to mobile platforms. They wished to create a new direct communications channel with their user base through an service industry leading mobile application. Prior to this communication was done through mailed monthly paper statements, their call centre, or through their web portal generally only received traffic from users after they received a mail statement. A major goal for this project was to create an application which would entice users to regularly return between statements creating a new higher touch connection.

This project which included both native iOS and Android versions interacting with the internal 407 ETR backend, was executed in weekly sprints with the first iteration of the application launching in the first 6 months. The application was continuously improved and extended over the course of a 5 year period of our involvement.

My Role

During the course of this project my role evolved from initially functioning as the sole designer and strategist, and transitioned to me leading a project team of 3 developers and 4 designers. My responsibilities included architecture oversight, creative direction, user interaction design, user research, client relationship management, and project management. The agile project was run in sprints with our team connected with 407 ETR at the start of each sprint to break out deliverables at a high level, then taking our items to own internal sprint board for breakdown and execution, and finally delivering completed work to our client for each sprint demo.

In a project such as this one with a complex service system, the need to understand not only the internal product offering but also the intricacies of their users required us to work closely with their internal teams connecting on a daily basis, and also to perform regular user research and testing sessions. The research sessions were done in a combination of one-on-one sessions, group sessions, and online surveys.

Research

As is important for any large project, we as designers and developers have a head full of ideas and concepts, before putting pencil-to-paper or diving into code, it is key to understand the users. User insights will almost always uncover unique circumstances which aren’t immediately obvious, this project was no exception. We began with interviews internally across the various business units from sales to call centre, and marketing and technology team to learn what we could about the subtleties of the operations. For our team, we had a head start in having previously build the companies web portal and B2B portal but it was important for us not to rely solely on this information. With the assistance of the internal development team we were able to brake down the existing users of the highway into rough conceptual persona groups, however before beginning persona creation we scheduled a series of one-on-one calls with actual users of the highway. I strongly believe that understanding users requires both analytics and human conversation, and once we had both in place we were able to begin crafting our personas.

Personas are a great tool for any team to build in order to create some abstraction from statistics and be able to humanize the actual targets of the systems we are creating. Our research and personas uncovered some fundamental truths about the users of the 407 ETR. Key to this were sensitivities to location tracking and how this information would be used, and the uneasiness users experienced with the “unexpected sizes” of their monthly bills.

It was key for us to ensure we did not end our research at this point in the project. To ensure this was not the end of our data collection we built the application with two key internal features which should be a part of any application or service with an expected multi-year life span:

In-App User Connection: In the case of this application we looked to inline surveys and built the application to allow for inline user surveys and questioners. This allowed us to poll users, ask questions about experiences and collect other valuable data from broad groups without setting up in-person user testing sessions.
Analytics data: We turned to Google Analytics as our choice for metric gathering, this is key in order to be able to know how your users interact with your application and be able to measure results of changes to test against assumptions. Additionally analytics provides data on device and OS version deployments in the applications user base, this is key information and cannot be reliably be substituted out for generic publicly available device and OS statistics as every application’s user base is unique.

Building user confidence

As a key finding in research was the uneasiness of users surrounding highway toll chargers we knew it needed to be a focus of the design. To accomplish this we were able to work with the business and internal technologies teams to engineer a method for providing up-to-date travel information immediately in the application. This allowed users the ability to keep an eye on their total travel spend and avoided the surprise bill at the end of the month. With the accessibility of a mobile application, this access to immediate usage data was key to increasing user confidence.

We additionally were able to provide a trip planning feature in the application to determine the cost of a trip on the highway prior to travelling. Initially this feature was considered for implementation as a full turn-by-turn navigation component but user testing quickly identified the value was in the highway entrance-to-exit travel cost and not the more expensive full routing and thus we were able to provide full value to the users without trying to pull them away from their preferred methods of navigation guidance. In this case ‘staying in our lane’ was important to not overstep.

To connect with one of the companies highway pillars “Safety” we were able to integrate a real time request for assistance feature in the application. Connecting any stranded users immediately with the operations centre for highway assistance.

Stickiness through Gamification

We knew from the onset of the project that our aim for the application was a longterm application, not a short marketing piece and as such stickiness was key to it’s design. Our focus was not to simply make another service application but to provide something new and unique to the domain so we focused on how to engage with the user first in onboarding and through the interactive landing pages. We wished to provide the users with a collection of fun and informative was to look at their travel information and settled on a series of animated and interactive cards.

As a formal reward program was already in existence and in process of parallel refresh, it was requested to not be included in the initial releases of the mobile application. Instead we looked to soft rewards as a method of providing some game-like concepts to the user experience. Though many were tried, we were able to settle on ones which connected to a key user metric “time-savings” with many concepts targeted for future releases once the traditional physical rewards were added.

One of the real wins for the application came in the ability to provide real-time notification of travel. By tying into the mobile app notification abilities and corresponding watch connections users were able to receive immediate notification on both their phones and connected smart watches with travel information and trips costs.

Converting users to mobile payments

A big part of the secondary goals for the application, and a justify for ongoing expenditure in mobile application innovation was the business case for moving users away from the traditional monthly payments triggered from paper mail to mobile payments occurring throughout the billing cycle. This goal, combined with the linked target of moving users from paper mailed statements to digital statements alone would create considerable operating savings for 407 ETR. To accomplish this end we first investigated and tested various payment options against the user base to learn what payment methods provided the most user confidence and were seen as the least complicated. The winning strategy was payments through the mobile platforms, Apple Pay and Google Pay, these both provide near-single click functionality and were seen as save and secure by users. Though there are additional costs associated with these methods, the business case was such that the gains in expected number of transactions outweighed the extra percentage costs. This change, once launched, had a fast and dramatic impact on payment channel for the 407 ETR. By extension, this also provided users who were less frequent drivers of the toll highway a channel to quickly make payments for travel and avoid the dreaded surprise statement weeks after the travel.

This change also opened future opportunities for further enhancement to alter the business model from monthly statements to support a pay-as-you-go model. I hope to see this become a reality for the 407 ETR in the near future as the business shifts further from traditional monthly billings.

Figure: Excerpt from the design file for payment processing.

Learnings

Users are very sensitive to systems that have tracking information such as speed of travel. As an application designer it is key to not expose information that may create user uneasiness.
End user desires and business requirements are often at war. In a perfect Disney dream world user needs/desires would win but in in true applications it is never that simple. When desires are opposed by years of business logic complexities or existing architectural restrictions, alternate paths are often required. The key is to find was to provide a balanced solution somewhere in-between
With the right team and business leadership innovative changes can be brought to any domain. We were able to push the boundaries of how a service based company can interact and engage with their users, creating something truly special.

Impact and Results

The 407 ETR application is currently live in the both the Apple AppStore and the Google Play as a top rated application; as of the end of my involvement in the project the application had a 4.8+ rating, charting at #14 for “Navigation” category in all of Canada. I believe these to be fantastic numbers for an application useful only for residents or regular visitors of the Greater Toronto Area.

The mobile application continues as a native application in a time of, single write/multi deployment frameworks. I believe native applications are a real benefit if the project budget allows as they provide the most space for innovation and creativity.

I hope to see more exiting features that we have designed, prototyped, and trialed appear in the near future for this application with a bright and exiting future.

Mobile app users: 400,000
Active users per month: 126,000
Transactions per month: $2.5 million