Northlink Ferries Concept

The Project

Northlink Ferries operate a life line service to the northern isles, sailing daily from Aberdeen northwards and vice versa. This side project – was to explore alternative options for an ios based app that customers would be able to use to make and check bookings, sailings and boarding passes.

The problem

Since the pandemic, support for the Northlink Ferries iOS booking app has ceased, giving customers either the choice between a clunky online booking process or a traditional telephone booking system on a premium number. Both these options have a trap in their process, that prevents the user from finding when a dog friendly cabin is available early on.

In this concept, I wanted to explore ways of presenting available options earlier in the journey, to stop the user having to perform multiple queries to find the available dates. In addition I wanted to design system that could utilise the iOS built in wallet options.

The Approach

The discovery and research phase kicked off with taking notes of all the key events in the booking process journey. Combinations and variables included number of passengers, different cabin types, the different vehicles form bikes to vans and food upsell options.

This list once it was compiled was broken up and grouped into categories, which was then sketched out as a wireframe. While there were ambitions to add additional functionality to the concept – the core purpose is to serve as a booking platform, so this was prioritised in the wireframe with extras being added on towards the end.

In particular I was keen to introduce a step in the booking process to allow the users to loop backwards to select alternative dates if they required a pet friendly cabin and there were none available. This was done by a pop up calendar function on the same screen showing the dates that were available. This introduces a key step into the booking process is not available on either the existing iOS app, the online booking platform, or for the customer service team over the phone.

Once the wireframe was fleshed out, the source material of the original ios App and online booking platform were constantly checked for missing variables, or steps that had been overlooked. Then finally – the finishing touches of branding, and customised icons could be added and refined.

The Solution

The finished product for the booking app is a good first draft and with an extensive phase of user testing, extended research on any difficulties that people run into along with an companion android app – I think this would be a solid step forward in the booking process for the company and an essential travelling companion for customers.

As a learning exercise, there were multiple challenges that I needed to overcome. For a next step i’d like to expand on a few of the limitations I came across in the prototype – such as having two actions on tapping one element (currently buttons need to be pressed twice for the selection animation – a reluctant workaround I had to use to allow the large main button to change from being inactive to active), but overall I think this is a solid first draft that showcases an improved work flow for the booking process.