Image Credit : Credit to the whole team for the design and development of the OTA redesign, in a specific big shout out to Ying Yin the Senior UI Designer for the OTA Redesign Project.
Project Overview
The Opal Travel Application (OTA) has over three million downloads and is used by over 175k NSW citizens on a daily basis to plan over seven million trips a month. With over 6 million user sessions a month OTA represents a crucial tool for citizens of NSW to access real-time public transport data and confidently perform trip planning along with multiple other transport management services.
Ensuring this crucial government service is highly usable and accessible by all citizens is essential. The OTA Redesign focused on taking the user experience of the application for users both with and without disabilities to new levels and push accessibility boundaries.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a global benchmark for accessibility. Australian Government legislation mandates Government digital assets comply with WCAG 2.0 (Level AA). From the inception of OTA, accessibility has always represented a key focus and the application has always maintained the required level of compliance.
The introduction of WCAG 2.1 provided essential updates to the guidelines. The OTA Redesign provided the opportunity to target compliance with the new standards and make significant accessibility improvements.
The team leveraged as much native out of the box accessibility technology as possible, however, significant levels of custom development were required to provide the best user experience possible and ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1. The team painstakingly, designed, developed, tested and refined custom code across each feature on each codebase to ensure the highest levels of accessibility.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Toby Gordon
Bipula Khatiwada
John Kotsalidis
Sarath Pillai
Linda Le
Ying Yin
Amit Vaghela
Artaza Aziz
Kamil Talanda
Lavinia Montebon
Long Le
Weiz Teoh
Stefan O'Shea
Dhruv Tekchandani
Project Brief
The overall brief of the project was to deliver the best user experience possible within the Opal Travel Application for the citizens of NSW regardless of disability and achieve WCAG 2.1 compliance.
The key objective was to go above and beyond the mandated WCAG 2.0 (level AA) and target compliance with WCAG 2.1 (level AA). WCAG 2.1 provided 17 additional success criteria that needed to be targeted in the Opal application. The additional success criteria focused on addressing the following:
- Mobile accessibility
- People with low vision
- People with cognitive and learning disabilities
Another major focus for TfNSW was to ensure current customers were continually engaged. Through user testing and feedback, it was established customers were unaware of some of the current functions of the application. The project therefore also targeted an overhaul of the app's overall design and information architecture to support accessibility, improve intuitiveness and engagement. It was essential that the redesign utilised the latest development tools and technologies and that the design leveraged the latest design concepts, principles and patterns.
Finally, there was a large focus on ensuring that the redesign addressed customer feedback and insights which resulted in significant UI and design improvements across the application ultimately resulting in a more engaging experience and aligning with best in class applications in the market.
Project Need
Of the 7.80 million residents of NSW, 1.37 million (18.34%) have a disability, almost one in five. Therefore, ensuring that the transportation services provided to this demographic are as accessible as possible from both a physical and digital perspective is absolutely essential.
Technology and the way in which users interact with technology has radically changed since the WCAG 2.0 standards were originally released. The rise of mobile, touch interfaces and hybrid interfaces have resulted in a vastly different playing field from an accessibility perspective. In addition, it was felt that some users' needs were not fully addressed in WCAG 2.0, specifically those users with low levels of vision or cognitive challenges. This resulted in the release of WCAG 2.1, aimed at addressing these challenges and issues.
Although OTA was WCAG 2.0 compliant and met government legislation the Opal redesign project provided an opportunity to push the envelope on accessibility and enhance the services and information available to those with a disability to increase their independence and improve their access to information.
As a crucial Transport service the need to design and develop OTA in accordance with WCAG 2.1 guidelines to make it as inclusive, accessible and highly usable to as much of the community as possible regardless of disability was paramount.
In addition to the accessibility updates, the redesign was also needed to update the overall design of the OTA application to improve usability using modern design patterns and practices.
User Experience
The focus for the Opal Travel Application was to deliver an uncompromised level of user experience for users both with and without disabilities. Ensuring high levels of usability whilst maintaining compliance with WCAG 2.1 and true inclusivity forced the OTA designers and developers to consider and analyse every element of the front end design and build. This included considerations and decisions surrounding colour, readability and content organisation.
To ensure the redesign was highly usable and met all accessibility requirements a 3rd party accessibility consultancy AccessHQ were engaged to perform accessibility testing and provide a definition of the applications level of compliance.
The Opal App was certified as WCAG 2.1 AA complaint and AccessHQ Australia’s preeminent accessibility consultancy firm provided the following comment following their assessment of the Opal Travel Application:
Over the past 2 years, AccessHQ has worked in close partnership with Transport for NSW and Tigerspike in ensuring that the Opal Travel App is accessible to all Australians, regardless of disability. We have been extremely impressed with how much the product team has built inclusivity into the app from the beginning. The team really have gone the extra mile to make the Opal Travel App accessible, being innovative in their approach to common web accessibility hurdles. Their implementation has managed to traverse the challenge of making technology accessible and meeting WCAG 2.1 Guidelines while maintaining a seamless customer experience and ensuring the App was highly usable.”
Project Marketing
The Opal Travel App is regularly promoted on Transport network assets to its customer base.
Project Privacy
As a public sector agency that will be collecting personal information from customers, TfNSW is required to comply with the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW) (PPIPA) and the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW) (HRIPA).
This policy addresses privacy obligations under PPIPA and HRIPA and is intended to inform customers of the circumstances in which TfNSW will be collecting, using and disclosing personal information in relation to their use of the Opal Ticketing System. The policy was developed in consultation with privacy consultants and legal advisors. The Policy covers customers who use the Opal card and the Opal Ticketing System. (A reference to a “customer” is a reference to any person who uses the Opal card or the Opal Ticketing System including any person who uses an Opal card that was acquired for them by another person.) It also covers the Opal Website and the Opal Travel Application available for download via the App Store or Google Play (Opal Travel App).
The full Opal Privacy Policy is available for download at https://www.opal.com.au/en/footer/privacy/
Digital - Government Services
The provision of timely government services has been transformed as applications and sites are developed and implemented to either replace or complement previous methods. Be it the delivery of current and up to date critical information, compliance, community support and engagement, notification and registration or providing greater accessibility to government resources.
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