Big Bus Tours

We started with workshops held with Big Bus teams from across its markets, and with the findings of Big Bus's own visitor research: why people take bus tours, what puts others off, and how they plan a trip.

We added our own research on the current site and its competitors, remote user testing, and a look at the languages people browse each city's site in, which showed where translation would matter.

Four personas came out of the research: mission planners, families, independent travellers and immersive explorers. Each plans, books and explores a city differently.

We followed each of them through six phases of a trip: dreaming, planning, booking, anticipating, experiencing and evaluating. The journeys show where the website, the app, a concierge or an email does the work, from a family reading up on London to an explorer printing a pocket guide for Paris.

We re-architected the navigation around five sections: The Big Bus Experience, Tickets & Passes, Routes & Times, Life in [city] and Help & Contact.

Behind them sits an inventory of eleven templates, from the home and landing pages to a bus stop finder, articles, FAQs and forms. Fewer templates means less to maintain, and a clearer plan for content in every city.

A content map set out everything the experience needed: tours and tickets, routes and stops, events, landmarks, attractions and restaurants in each city, help topics and every customer email.

Each content module has a type, from editorial and sales promotion to utility, help and social, and a dependency: content to produce, an integration to confirm or a technical requirement to settle.

We captured 83 features from the customer's point of view: 37 need, 28 should and 18 could. For each phase of the trip, we plotted them by priority and size, and marked those that served one persona most.

Planning called for an itinerary planner and clear ticket comparison; booking for a lean checkout with live chat and reassurance on payment; the day itself for finding the nearest stop and the next bus. After the tour came a thank-you email and a chance to review the guide.

Personalisation rules decided what to show and when: the right city homepage from someone's location, the night tour at night, and more about the day ahead once a ticket is bought.

Five principles guided the design: communicate unobtrusively yet proactively, simplify the product proposition, be known as a way into discovering a city, be helpful at every stage, and think omnichannel, online and on the bus.