New concepts for the SBB app

How to innovate something already very successful?

The challenge

The SBB app is among the most downloaded and used apps in Switzerland. This success means opportunities, but also challenges. For example: How can innovation be fuelled in order to surpass the expectations of future travellers?

Furthermore, despite having such a successful product, it was important to set big new goals. The SBB app team was clear about that: They want to become the #1 travel guide app in Switzerland.

We supported the SBB app team with an unbiased external perspective on their pipeline and with innovative concepts for the app in order to come one step closer to their eventual goal.

How we tackled the challenge

It was clear that in order to generate new ideas, a dream team of Creaholicers with experts in various fields had to be assembled. The team consisted of people with backgrounds in information technology, interaction design, marketing, industrial design and robotics.

Several iterative sessions were set up to generate ideas and novel approaches. Together, we discussed the trade-off between maintaining well performing and introducing new functionalities that deliver novel benefits. The SBB project team had the chance to rate and choose the 6 best ideas.

These ideas were then worked out in more detail with first sketches and mock-ups, in order to choose one final topic.

The results

Early in the project, we learned that people very often are in a hurry when using the app. For example, they’re on the way to the station and quickly need to find the next connection, they need to buy a ticket at the last second before jumping on the train, or they rapidly need to find their card when the conductor appears in their carriage. This is why the chosen topic for a more in-depth concept was predictive functionalities.

We thought about different situations, how the app can always provide the information that the user would need at that very moment. Because data privacy is a crucial topic to SBB and to us, we researched learning possibilities other than just tracking the user's location. Finally, we developed use cases and prototypes to enhance the SBB Mobile App using predictive functionalities. The primary goal at every stage was to deliver more relevant information for SBB travellers at any given moment.

Deliverables:

  • Outside perspective on existing feature pipeline

  • Idea backlog of 40+ novel approaches

  • 6 feature concepts with sketches

  • 1 focused in-depth concept with prototypes

Karin Lanz

User Experience Architect, SBB

«In the early phase of product development it’s important to keep the scope of the solution as wide as possible. Creaholic played the role of “challenger” and “idea developer”—helping us to accept new inputs and rethink our existing assumptions.»

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