Native App UX and CRO Optimisation

Showing Big Bus Tours how to grow conversions and transactions through their native app. 

The Challenge 

• Meeting growing customer expectations.
• Achieving commercial growth objectives.
• Streamlining and optimising the online experience.

Big Bus Tours, founded in 2011, have shot to success by offering their customers an unrivalled experience when visiting an international city. Operating in 25 cities and 14 countries, they’re the largest open top bus sightseeing tour operator in the world.  

When Hugo was appointed, he inherited a native iOS and Android application that was functional and provided a solid foundation from which to grow, but fell below customer expectations in several areas. As a real differentiator for Big Bus Tours, redesigning the app user experience was now a priority. 

Essentially, the user experience of the app had to evolve to meet user expectation. The online and offline experiences weren’t reflective of each other, the design looked tired, it wasn’t optimised for ecommerce and the user experience between the app and web was inconsistent.  Collectively the digital team knew this needed to improve.  

In addition to the user needs and requirements, Hugo was also tasked with delivering on a number of commercial objectives set out by the board which, if hit, would result in additional budget and resources being allocated to his team. It was a real chance to put the app front and centre of the Big Bus Digital Experience. 

The Solution 

Like anybody in a new role, the desire to demonstrate your capabilities and have an instant impact is of huge importance. Collectively, we understand that balancing the customer needs with business needs was going to be a challenge. Simply offering more in-app purchases, adverts and upsells wasn’t going to cut it – we needed to better understand the real reasons customers wanted to use the app.  

To achieve this, we involved users immediately. Working with the Big Bus Tours team we undertook rapid user research allowing us to make better decisions and drastically reduce the risk of failing in design.  

To generate ideas and ensure we focussed our efforts in the right direction – we needed to better understand how customers currently used the app and what they valued most. This helped us to uncover insights like;  

Travellers… 

• Primarily used the app for helping them explore a city and all it had to offer. 
• Wanted to know where to get off the bus if they need a wee. 
• Wanted familiarity and expected similar mapping features to that of Google Maps.