Stagecoach

Using Behavioural Nudges to Convert App Users into Paying Customers

A 2-month project to improve Stagecoach’s ticket purchase flow and increase conversions through behavioural design.

Problem

With 3 million monthly active users, Stagecoach had a massive audience, yet the Stagecoach team were strugging to convert these users into paying customers.

The app felt clunky, outdated, and was losing ground to smoother, faster competitors like Google Maps and Citymapper especially for the core use case of checking bus times.

Task

Understand the behavioural patterns of bus travellers and figure out how to nudge non-paying users into buying tickets through the app.

Solution

While our research explored the full end-to-end bus travel experience, this project focused on a more targeted challenge:

How might we use behavioural nudges to encourage non-purchasing users to buy tickets, while improving the overall ticket-buying experience?

That meant narrowing in on one key part of the journey: ticket purchasing.

We weren’t just trying to make things more usable, we were designing for conversion. The aim wasn’t just to help users complete a task, but to nudge them into a commercial action that aligned with Stagecoach’s business goals.

To do that, we turned to behavioural science. Specifically, the MINDSPACE theory.

Buy Before You Board

We introduced a fixed-action button within the journey-planning flow to prompt users to buy tickets in advance. It was all about timing, surfacing the option when users were already thinking about their journey.

🧠 Nudges used:

• Priming – Introduced the idea of pre-purchase earlier in the flow

• Norms – Framed advance buying as the expected behaviour

• Salience – Made the action more visible and timely

If you want to read more and see my process, check out the full story below…

Who are Stagecoach?

Stagecoach do busses. If you’re reading this in the UK and walk into your local high street you might just find one. They’re the the UK’s largest bus operator. They operate local and express bus services across major cities in the UK. The Stagecoach app allows customers to plan bus travel by allowing them to see bus times, tracking bus locations and to buy tickets in advance before boarding the bus.

Discovery Research

UX Audit

To kick things off, I did a deep dive into the current Stagecoach app and ran a heuristic audit of the experience. I screengrabbed every screen and sorted them into use cases; planning journeys, tracking buses, buying tickets, and more.

From there, I annotated the journeys by colour-coding pain points, comments, standout moments, and opportunities. This formed the foundation for what we needed to dig into during user interviews.

Key findings

Customer Interviews

We wanted to go beyond the interface and understand how people actually approach bus travel—when they plan, what stresses them out, and what role the app plays in their routine.

Research Areas

• Mindsets and behaviours around travel, planning, and timing

• Attitudes towards bus travel—including ticketing and real-world journeys

• Experience with the Stagecoach app and other travel apps (e.g. Citymapper, Google Maps)

Who we spoke to

We ran 12 semi-structured, 60-minute interviews over video using Lookback. We aimed for a 50/50 split between Stagecoach and non-Stagecoach users, with a mix of ages, travel habits, and payment methods (contactless, mobile app, and cash).

Some Feedback from our Participants

Research Process

The Insights

Zooming in on a couple of insights

I’ve pulled out a couple of core insights that had real weight behind them, especially in the context of ticket buying. These were backed by multiple users and shaped the direction of our opportunity areas.

Opportunity Framing

From what we learnt, there was no one-stop-shop magic bullet to improve app adoption and increase ticket sales. 

So the challenge that lay ahead was not solved by building big things but nudging behaviour changes and encouraging new habits.

Ideation & Prioritisation

Introducing: MINDSPACE

MINDSPACE is a behavioural framework created by the UK Government’s Behavioural Insights Team. It's essentially a cheat sheet for understanding what actually influences people’s decisions beyond what they say they’ll do.

It’s a helpful lens for nudging behaviour in a way that feels natural, not forced. It’s especially useful when you're designing something where habit or hesitation gets in the way of action, like getting people to buy a ticket before boarding a bus.

Creating How Might We’s from Opportunity Areas

We used the insights from research to shape a set of How Might We (HMW) questions. These helped us reframe problems and guide ideation.

Rapid Ideation Sprint

We set a timer for an hour and each stuck our headphones on and ideated solutions against the How Might We’s. The aim was speed, and breadth as opposed to coming up with 5-10 ideas. We wanted a whole load of ideas we could then recluster to create parent themes.

Thematic Clustering

After generating nearly 190 ideas, we started to see patterns. We grouped similar concepts into themes and began to identify overlaps in thinking.

From this, nine unique ideas emerged, each with a clear parent theme and supporting ‘child’ activations. These child ideas represented specific ways we could bring the themes to life in the app.

Prioritisation Workshop

We ran a workshop with the Stagecoach team to decide which ideas to move forward with. Using an impact/effort matrix, we prioritised ideas that would make the biggest difference with the least friction to build.

The two themes that stood out to the client were:

1. Strong default buying in-app

2. App purchasing as a social norm

The 3 Activation Ideas We Took Forward

Hold on, let’s zoom out for a second…

With nearly 200 ideas on the table and a clearer sense of our design priorities, we needed a way to zoom out and bring everything together. We wanted to understand not just what people were doing, but when, where, and why problems and opportunities were emerging.

That’s where the experience map came in.

Experience Map

With discovery complete and ideas now prioritised, we created an experience map to tie everything together; insights, opportunities, HMWs, and early concepts.

It helped us visualise the real world journey people take when using the bus and gave us a clear sense of where we were seeing clusters of friction, behaviour patterns, and opportunities to act.

💡We saw the highest density of insights and ideas across three key moments:

1. Planning & Assessing the Journey at Home

2. Checking Times & Going to the Bus Stop

3. Waiting at the Bus stop

The map became a central alignment tool for both our team and the client, helping us stay anchored to real user needs while moving into design.

What the Map Captured

🗺️ Travel Context & Phases - We mapped the journey across key travel moments; from the kitchen table to the bus stop.

📌 Jobs To Be Done - We outlined the core jobs users were trying to complete at each stage, like “Check bus arrival time” or “Buy a ticket while waiting.”

📊 Supporting Data - We pulled in relevant data points from Stagecoach (quant and qual) to validate where user needs and business goals intersected.

💬 Insights - Key behavioural patterns (like “Habit drives Behaviour” or “Leave me alone I’ve got this”) were mapped against specific journey phases.

❓ How Might We - We plotted our HMW questions directly onto the journey map to frame solution thinking at the most relevant pain points.

💡 Ideas - We dropped our prioritised ideas onto the map to see where we had coverage and where gaps still existed.

🌎 Inspiration - To stretch thinking, we brought in reference points from competitors and global UX patterns (e.g. bus signage in Singapore, First Bus, and Citymapper flows).

Design

After our prioritisation workshops, three strong ideas emerged. For me, they naturally grouped into two key design directions:

‘Buy Before You Board’

Users often didn’t make it to the ticket section, especially in the journey planner and live map, where their focus was elsewhere. We wanted to introduce a clear ‘Buy Before You Board’ button in those areas to gently nudge users at the right moment, without disrupting their flow.

• Priming – Introduces the idea of buying earlier

• Norms – Reinforces pre-purchase as standard behaviour

• Salience – Makes ticketing more visible

Workings

Buy Before You Board

Bringing in the ‘Buy Before You Board’ CTA was relatively straightforward. The main task was to identify the key pages that we wanted to bring in the CTA. We believed the screens to bring in the CTA were;

1. Via Plan a Journey + Journey Details

2. Via Live Map

Optimised Ticket Buying Journey

Task 1: Clean up the flow

We made a few key decisions to streamline the journey:

• Combined basket and checkout – Less than 3% of users bought multiple tickets, so the basket felt unnecessary for most. We merged it with checkout to simplify the path.

• Made Apple Pay the default – To reduce decision fatigue, we nudged users towards a single, fast payment method while still offering others.

• Removed the mandatory ticket info page – Instead of forcing everyone through pages of Ts & Cs, we tucked the details behind an info icon for those who needed them.

Task 2: Make ticket search easier

Originally, users had to tap through tabs (single, daily, weekly, etc). I explored three alternatives:

1. Filters – Let users refine by ticket type, number of passengers, and sort order

2. Category landing page – Start with ticket type, then show fewer, more relevant results

3. Carousel view – Expand/collapse layout to browse ticket types in one place

Task 3: Clean up the ticket cards

The cards were too busy, taking up the whole screen and making it hard to compare options. I sketched four variations aimed at reducing clutter and improving scannability, so users could quickly understand what’s on offer.

Usability Testing

Findings & Recommendations

Test 1: ‘Buy Before You Board’

Test 2: Optimised Ticket Buying Journey

Reflections

This was a really interesting project, it wasn’t about a flashy redesign, but something more subtle, systemic, and grounded in real-world behaviour.

It reminded me that while solving user problems is a huge part of UX design, it’s often (and more realistically) superseded by business objectives. Our goal here was to convert more users in-app, but in doing so, we were also giving customers more autonomy and control over their journey.

We wanted to spare them from standing in a queue in the rain, or fumbling for a card while holding up the bus. Ego played a role, we were nudging users toward being a more confident, prepared version of themselves. Owning their bus journey. Being the master.

On the team

Collaboration is a big one for me. I really thrive when I’m working closely with a strategist and project manager, it keeps things moving and ideas flowing.

Huge shoutout to Mattie Alston for being such a great person to work with. He pushes me to think differently, and we’re super aligned when it comes to behavioural thinking. It’s always refreshing (and reassuring) when you’re not just focused on page structure, but on the real reasons people interact with products in the first place.

On research

Research could’ve gone better. Not the quality of the work, but we needed more time (as always). Trying to squeeze that level of synthesis into a week just isn’t sustainable, it creates stress and burnout. I think 3 weeks is a more realistic amount of time to properly plan, conduct, and unpack good generative research.

On optimisation

Overall, it was a fantastic project and a great one to work on a native app focused on optimisation rather than innovation or transformation. Optimisation projects might not be sexy, but they can be the real turning points when it comes to driving conversion. It was great to get hands-on experience in that space.

What came next?

This project opened the door to a whole series of future Stagecoach projects.

As you may have noticed, the existing UI and design system was dated compared to competitors like TfL Go, Citymapper, and Google Maps. So in February 2025, we began work on a full redesign of Stagecoach’s design language.

Then in April, Mattie and I moved on to the onboarding journey - exploring how we could improve retention and increase account creation through a better first-time experience. (More on that in the next case study!)