Central Japan Railway Company
EX App
It is their official app for member online booking&ticketless boarding services, "Express Yoyaku" and "Smart EX" where users can book/change seats on Tokai/Sanyo Bullet Trains. Book a train on the go, easy travel with an IC card. The new bullet train experience via your smartphone.
*Photo provided by JR Tokai
The app that makes booking and changes easy&quick
This is an app that makes the entire bullet train experience easy and user friendly. Just type in the time and distance to find the available trains or you can search by the train name or the seat number. It has all the basic functions to complete the seat booking and changes in just few steps and takes out the stress as you can confirm the seat availability before clicking RESERVE. The app even offers pre-booking 7 days before the official sale(1 month before boarding), out-of-hour booking, as well as allow users to check their purchase history and issue receipts. The app offers better convenience with their own push notification, camera detection of credit/IC cards, and allows users to save their common searches. You must regiser your credit card before booking.(approval from the credit card company is mandatory).
Offering the same functions but leveraging the unique features of the different OS
As the service is offered across multiple OS, our mission was to develop an app that doesn't reveal sections reliant on exisitng web service nor the service spec definition. We leveraged the unique factors of a native app, iOS and Android, offering the same functionalities along with selecting the development environment and language that allows for a swift response to OS updates.
What the desiners said…
Fine balance of rich functionalities and ease of use
One of the challenges in the design is to maintain the right balance between the functions offered and the ease of use because of the intricacies of various user operation patterns in "booking a seat on a bullet train." Dissecting the complex structure to designing the optium solution was an interesting challenge. Our job is never done and we will continue to update to make the app even easier to navigate and use!
What the engineers said…
Challenge of a big project
As this was a large-scale project, we were faced with various technical challenges. As we expect more users to use the app, we are commited to upgrading the app for not simply the ease of use but also durability and quality maintenance.
