A transport app shaped by how people travel

Services
Research
UX/UI design
Usability testing
Design system
Client
IDS BK
Timeframe
4 months
IDS BK, the Integrated Transport System of the Bratislava Region, connects multiple transport operators and modes under one regional mobility system, allowing passengers to travel with a single ticket across the network.

Our work focused on redesigning the IDS BK app so that this integrated service became easier to use in everyday life. Through research, usability testing, and design, we helped turn an aging and inconsistent app into a clearer, faster, and more intuitive experience built around how people actually travel.
Key outcomes
  1. Research-led redesign based on analytics, interviews, and testing
  2. 30 user interviews & quantitative questionnaire
  3. Faster ticket purchase and a more useful home screen
  4. Simpler access without mandatory registration
  5. 500+ unique screens designed in Light and Dark mode

Rooted in interviews, testing, and real travel patterns

The redesign started with a simple premise: the app should reflect real passenger behavior, not assumptions about how public transport “should” be used. To get there, the work combined product analysis, analytics review, competitor research, and interviews across very different user types.  
The research phase included analysis of the current solution, data from analytics and annual reports, competitor review, and interviews with occasional users, regular users, and people who had never used the app at all. Respondents ranged from high school students to retirees. That mix mattered because IDS BK serves a broad public, not one narrow digital audience. The result was a clearer picture of what people expected from the app, what frustrated them, and which patterns were repeated often enough to shape the redesign.
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Designed for very different kinds of passengers

The app had to work for a broad public, not just confident digital users. That included tourists, elderly passengers, regular commuters, and people with little prior familiarity with the product.
This diversity shaped both the research and testing phases. Interviews included people from very different age groups and usage patterns, while usability testing brought in target groups such as tourists in Bratislava, older users who buy paper tickets, and regular users of the tram-ticket app. Designing for this spread of users raised the standard for clarity. Features could not depend on insider knowledge or overly technical assumptions. They had to make sense to people approaching the product from very different contexts.
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Making access and ticket purchase faster

Research showed that two things mattered at the same time: users wanted to get into the app without unnecessary registration, and they wanted ticket purchase to be as fast as possible when they needed it most.
User interviews showed that mandatory registration felt unnecessary and time-consuming, especially for people who wanted to try the app first. At the same time, ticket purchase was the app’s core job, and users often bought tickets at the last possible moment, for example when they already saw the bus approaching. These two findings pointed to the same product principle: reduce friction at the exact moments where speed matters most. In the redesign, the app was planned to work without mandatory registration, while ticket purchase was simplified into a two-click flow with a preselected payment method based on previous use.  
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From research insights to a reusable design system.

At kickoff, the client presented requirements that couldn't fit the timeframe. The first real deliverable was a realistic roadmap with clear priority tiers.

We ran two parallel discovery streams and shaped an MVP definition with Sales stakeholders, focused on a product useful from day one.
Research & User Interviews
Wireframes & Usability Testing
Design System Definition
UI Design Across 500+ Screens
Handoff

Research
& Wireframe Validation

The process started with analytics review, competitor analysis, and interviews across different passenger groups, from students to retirees.

Those insights were then tested on wireframes before final UI work began, helping validate key journeys such as ticket purchase, route search, and registration-related flows early and more efficiently.

Design System as the Product Backbone

Once the core flows were validated, the next step was to turn them into a reusable design language. The design system gave the app a shared set of components, interaction patterns, and rules.

Instead of solving each screen separately, it made usability improvements more consistent, repeatable, and easier to maintain over time.

Scaling the Interface Consistently

With the design system in place, the redesign could expand into a large screen set while staying visually and functionally coherent.

The final output covered more than 500 unique screens in both Light and Dark mode, giving the client not just a refreshed interface, but a structured design foundation for future iteration.

Built around repeated routes and repeated choices

Most travel behavior turned out to be highly repetitive, which made habit-based features more valuable than generic feature expansion.
Research found that 85% of users repeatedly purchased the same ticket, and interviewed users said that about 90% of the time they travel the same route, such as home to work or home to school. Those patterns directly shaped features like the most frequently purchased ticket, saved addresses, and favorite routes with upcoming departures and disruption updates. Instead of asking users to start from scratch every time, the redesigned app was structured to support routines they were already following.
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"What impressed us most about this company was their exceptional creative thinking and the innovative ideas they brought to the table.

‍

They demonstrated a unique ability to translate our specific requirements into practical yet imaginative solutions."

Peter Sliacan
Peter Sliacan
IT Specialist, IDS BK
5*

Research is only valuable when it scales into the product.

For IDS BK, the work did not end with interviews, wireframes, or isolated UX fixes.

The challenge was to turn research findings into a product system that could stay coherent across hundreds of screens, repeated travel scenarios, and future iterations.

That is where the design system mattered. It helped translate insights about how people actually travel into reusable components, clearer interaction patterns, and a stronger foundation for consistent design decisions across the app.
500+
Unique screens designed in Light and Dark mode
30
User Interviews
200h
Of research