Page Title

App Home Redesign

As Design Lead, I set the long-term vision for the Trainline app homepage. I led the design strategy and guided the team from vision through to delivery, rethinking the experience for customers buying tickets on the day. The redesign increased conversion to purchase by 12% and added 1.2 million extra ticket sales per year.

Team setup

1x Design Lead (me)
1 x Product Manager
9 Engineers (iOS, Android & Backend) + Engineering Manager
1 x Data scientist

New social behaviours

The pandemic brought a significant shift in train ticket purchasing, with more users moving from advance bookings to same-day purchases. We identified that the existing top-of-funnel experience no longer served the majority, leaving key user needs unmet.

Discovery research

The research team conducted discovery research to understand user needs following the societal shift. They found that across UK and EU markets, the top priorities for most users were securing the lowest price possible and a fast purchasing process.

Ideation

I led cross-functional ideation across Product, Marketing, Engineering, Design and Brand, bringing different perspectives together to tackle key user needs around price and speed of purchase. I facilitated the sessions and translated the ideas into a hypothesis tree, helping the team align on and prioritise the biggest opportunities.

Opportunity area 1

Speed & convenience

Quick search
One-tap booking
Fast checkout
Remember details
Repeat booking

Opportunity area 2

Best price possible

Familiar
Discounts
Deals
Fare transparency
Loyalty

Learning quickly

We built quick, throwaway experiments to test the impact of price and validate our assumptions. The results reinforced that users valued speed to purchase, while showing that surfacing price earlier in the funnel increased click-through and overall Net Ticket Sales (NTS), which gave us the evidence and confidence to invest in more scalable solutions.

Current

Control

Variant 1

+ £0.83m NTS

Variant 2

+ £0.96m NTS

Going bigger and bolder

Armed with confidence from our experiments, I helped take the concept further, rethinking the app's wider real estate and shaping a new dynamic homepage. While commuters remained our core audience, the new homescreen moved us beyond a one-size-fits-all experience, creating space for more personalised content tailored to individual user needs and behaviours.

Roll up search and serve commuter needs better

Top usability insights

I shaped the test plan and led unmoderated user testing, with support from Research. While we already had confidence in our approach, I wanted clear evidence that the solution worked and identify where we could improve.

Testing reinforced three key things:

Everyone understood how to buy a ticket for the next train.
Live departure times and 'Direct' or '1 change' information were highly valued.
Showing prices provided reassurance, as users could quickly recognise what they typically paid.

Documentation

With a completely new homescreen, clear documentation and specifications were essential to bringing the experience to life. I created detailed designs covering different scenarios and edge cases, with annotations and guidance for Engineering, alongside accessibility readout scripts to help ensure we met AA standards.

Longer term thinking

This laid the foundations for deeper personalisation across the app experience: thus was born, the Global Homescreen. I led a cross-functional workshop, bringing together key stakeholders from across all of the Product teams to explore how this new space could work and unlock opportunities for Trainline as a business.

This led to creating a collective hierarchy to follow

Examples of components

Market specific home pages

We identified opportunities to tailor the baseline experience across our key markets (UK, France, Spain and Italy), surfacing relevant content to drive engagement. I designed a flexible set of components with a global mindset, allowing us to test different variants through A/B experiments and learn what worked best in each market.

Impact

This marked a significant shift for Trainline as a product, introducing a dynamic, personalised homepage and laying the foundations for market-specific conversion improvements. It became a major milestone in the product's evolution and one of our most significant initiatives for driving ticket sales.

+£1.5m

ticket sales, about 7% of Trainline revenue (6-week reading)

−15s

faster to buy, median time to buy a ticket, from 62s to 47s

+12%

user visits ending in a ticket purchase, 8% to 9%. Relative

Before

Now

Learnings and reflections

I'm genuinely proud to have helped bring this vision to life. It was built on strong insights, data and storytelling, but just as importantly, it taught me how to get people behind an idea.

I learned to navigate senior stakeholders, lead conversations and build the confidence and buy-in needed to secure investment for one of Trainline's biggest product initiatives, right at the heart of Europe's most downloaded rail app.

My product partner and I worked as true equals, showing up as a united front, sharing responsibility and giving our squads and senior stakeholders clear direction.

My biggest takeaway is really owning a product means knowing your data, anticipating the tough questions, seeing things from different perspectives and having the confidence to stand behind your decisions.