Image Credit : Transurban Limited / Outware Mobile
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Project Overview
The LinktGO app uses a smartphone’s GPS technology to identify when a driver has entered and exited any Australian toll road, replacing the need for a tag.
Team
Rob Natoli Thomas Ruffie Lei Zhang Michael Loo Ted Fan Yejin Lee Miffra Lee Joel Schmidt Ryan Hodgman Aanchal Midha Damien He Esther Halvey
Project Brief
Following the success of the award-winning CityLink app for iOS and Android, as well as the Transurban Linkt app for iOS and Android, Transurban approached Outware Mobile, a Melbourne IT company, with the idea for an app that would allow infrequent toll road users to travel on toll roads using only their smartphone, replacing the need for an e-Tag.
Outware ran a tech spike workshop in collaboration with Transurban and another vendor to test the feasibility of using a smartphone to geo-tag a journey. Having built a basic POC that proved technological capability, Outware and Transurban then progressed the project to development.
Project Need
Transurban recognised a shift in how infrequent travellers want to interact with toll roads. Research indicated that these customers want easy ways to manage and pay for tolls, without needing to commit to an ongoing account. Having identified these insights, Transurban commissioned Outware to develop a mobile app solution that would simplify the interactions infrequent travellers have with toll roads.
User Experience
The LinktGO app has been designed to allow users to sign up to the service using only their mobile phone number, license plate number, and a credit card. The app provides users with clear visibility of their toll road trips, as well as associated cost breakdowns. The app also allows trip-by-trip payments and uses push notifications to remind the user when a payment is due.
In order to understand how the app would perform in the field and get feedback from real users, Transurban released the app to a beta testing group of 1200 participants. Throughout the beta trial, Outware ran user testing sessions with the trial participants to gather feedback and prioritise new feature development.
Travel can be a stressful experience, and the LinktGO app has been designed to allow for a variety of different driving circumstances. Multiple users can register for the app using the same vehicle registration, and a single user can also have multiple vehicles registered. In order to make the app as simple and easy to use as possible, LinktGO uses simple icons and leverages iOS and Android design patterns to ensure an intuitive experience for users, while in-app hints and pre-filled form fields make it easy for users to complete tasks within the app.
The app’s user experience is being continually refined and new features added based on user feedback, queries, and observed behaviour.
Project Marketing
The LinktGO app was promoted through an eight week, multimedia marketing campaign targeted at infrequent toll road users. Consumer responses have been positive, with the app receiving an average rating of 4.1 in the Google Play Store, and 3.5 in the Apple App Store (as of 11/1/2018).
LinktGO has been featured on Smart Company, ITWire, and 7News, highlighting its unique user experience and the clear benefit it provides to Transurban customers.
Project Privacy
The LinktGO app has been designed to allow users to sign up to the service using only the minimum amount of personal data required, namely their license plate number, mobile phone, and credit card details. As such, no additional user data is required or stored by the app.
Once a customer has registered to LinktGO, whenever the app is launched, it uses the smartphone’s location services functionality to determine when the customer travels on a toll road. LinktGO doesn’t record the geo-location of a customer’s smartphone except when their smartphone is in the vicinity of a toll road. This location data is used solely for the purpose of constructing toll road trips and is stored securely on Australian servers.
The LinktGO app is PCI compliant and does not process credit card transactions directly; transactions are processed through banking institutions, with the app only storing the last four digits of a user’s credit card to ensure that the user’s financial privacy is maintained.
Digital - TravelTech
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