Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB)

The Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) works to ensure the safety of passengers and staff on the British railways. It helps create technical standards and operating procedures, and publishes the Rule Book used by train drivers and other railway staff. RSSB also funds research into innovate technologies that can improve rail safety.

RSSB briefed us to help them give their members (the railway companies and Network Rail) more value for their membership and raise their profile as the go-to destination for railway news and information. We were asked to produce a digital experience strategy to improve the engagement of members with RSSB's products and services.

www.rssb.co.uk

What I did

Methodologies used

• User research interviews
• Stakeholder interviews
• User personas
• User journey mapping
• Content strategy
• Prototyping / wireframing

As UX lead for this project, I started with a series of interviews with end users and internal stakeholders to gather insights on user needs and frustrations with the current digital estate. The research revealed that RSSB’s members found the site overwhelming and difficult to navigate. The site has a huge amount of useful content, but it was very hard to find what you’re looking for among all of the available content. RSSB itself was seen by many in the industry as slow-paced and outdated. I also discovered that RSSB had a complex and unstructured process for generating content for the site.

Based on these insights, I designed a new topic-based content model to group content around key topics of interest to end users of the website, so that all relevant content around these topics can be easily found. I created user journeys, personas and wireframes of key pages which were turned into high-fidelity, responsive UI designs.

I worked with my team to develop a content strategy for the creation, publishing and promotion of content around these chosen subjects. We also defined a set of user engagement KPIs to measure success.

Results

The results of the six-week pilot of the new content (compared with the same period the year before) drove a 264% increase in page views for optimised and rewritten content, a 93% increase in downloads of documents on the optimised and rewritten pages, and a 106% increase of social media traffic to the new content.

To learn more, see the case study on Nomensa's website.