Amtrak
Improving the authenticated experience
The Challenge.
Amtrak’s digital sites were splintered and confusing to riders. Riders maintained two profiles and two sets of logins, one for managing travel on Amtrak.com and one for managing their Amtrak Guest Rewards (AGR) account. With enrollment in Guest Rewards trending down, an Amtrak.com redesign provided the perfect opportunity to streamline the digital experience. As the User Experience Design Lead, I needed to help the client and our internal Loyalty team take a step back and answer some key questions:
What was the underlying problem(s)?
Should we maintain two separate, but cohesive, experiences or combine the two sites?
How could we improve the experience to increase enrollment and ancillary revenue?
What AGR specific components would need to be created and added to Amtrak’s new design system?
The Approach.
Research
I began finding answers to my questions by conducting competitive research on loyalty programs inside and outside of the travel industry to understand how their approach to integrating their rewards program into the overall experience. I found the vast majority maintained a single site experience, particularly in the travel and hotel industries.
Additionally, I conducted a survey on both sites to understand user pain points. Combined with analyzing data from the customer service department, it. became clear that the lack of integration between Amtrak.com and the rewards program was a barrier.
IA & Content Strategy
The great thing about working with our Loyalty team was the access I had to data. The challenge of working with our Loyalty team was all that data. AGR had four different user states that determined which content and offers were shown. I’m all about personalization, but in this case site structure and navigation changed based on the type of user which was confusing and also made for a complicated content audit.
I conducted a thorough content audit to get my arms around the site and determine which content should be migrated or retired. Through this process, I identified opportunities to improve site structure and maintain consistency regardless of the user type.
User Journeys
In order to combine two authenticated experiences, I catalogued each specific user task. Buying tickets, redeeming coupons, checking points, and personalized offers all had to live in the same environment, so I reviewed current journeys and created future state user flows to validate my approach with team members and the client.
I worked closely with the BA to build in requirements to the user journeys to ensure my site map accounted for all the complexities of the site. I streamlined the experience by grouping related actions together and removing the many pop ups and modals used on the previous site.
Getting Personal
Expanding personalization capabilities was a key piece of the project. In addition to account maintenance, preferences and history, I designed an authenticated experience that delivers personalized content and offers, allowing Amtrak to further engage with their riders and present upsell opportunities at exactly the right moment. These improvements allowed users to book travel directly from their account and automatically apply earned coupons and rewards without the need for codes or calling customer service.
Since the sites had been last updated, mobile traffic had increased exponentially. Users were increasingly booking travel and checking train status from their phones. I utilized tiles to structure the page based on importance, which allowed for a clean transition to mobile. I also recommended removing the carousel on mobile to give faster access to the most important information.
Trial & Error
Helping users understand how the rewards program works is an integral part of the experience, so the Program Details page was a major focus for the client and Loyalty team. And they all had a lot of opinions. A lot. I worked through multiple iterations taking into consideration the team’s feedback and user needs. My goal was to give users the most important information in easy to digest chunks, instead of putting the burden on users to scan and compare through the table. The client felt that this content was repetitive and that “people liked the comparison chart”. I reworked my wireframes again to arrive at a solution we could all agree on, displaying a snapshot of the most important details about each tier above an ever present comparison chart.
Navigating Regulations
As part of the redesign, the credit card comparison page needed to seamlessly fit into the experience instead of feeling like an ad. Tackling this page added another stakeholder group into the mix, Amtrak’s credit card partner. Credit card enrollment is a main source of ancillary revenue, so my plan was to keep the focus on the conversion goal with a sticky column header and design a comparison chart that was easily scannable on all devices. Finding a balance between required disclosures and not overwhelming the user with massive amounts of text proved to be the biggest challenge. I accomplished this by breaking the table into sections by information type and recommending displaying the more detailed regulatory information in tool tips. Initially, I was met with some resistance from the internal team because this much different from the original design and they weren’t sure if their credit card partner would approve it. Fortunately, lean into our trusted partnership and gain buy-in from the client. Ultimately, their partner was so pleased with the design and potential for increased conversions they approved my recommendations.
The Results: Numbers Don’t Lie.
Since launching in 2018, the results have been staggering:
Incremental revenue of $90mm + 6x ROI
22.5% increase in ridership among members
70% growth in ancillary revenue
