TRAVEL & TRANSPORTATION
FS Italiane improves
user experience
FS Italiane improves
user experience

Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane (FSI) creates and manages railway transportation and services in Italy. With its newly designed logistics portal, FS Italiane has succeeded in customer and suppliers acceptance.
Reduction from 16 to 7
clicks via mobile app
clicks via mobile app
Project highlight
Switch to mobile
devices to reduce
actions
devices to reduce
actions
Project highlight
Higher acceptance
from suppliers &
customers
from suppliers &
customers
Project highlight
Meet Customers’ Needs
Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane is one of Italy’s largest and most influential industrial corporations. Around 70,000 employees contribute to the operation of over 8,000 trains per day, resulting in 600 million passengers and 50 million tons of freight transported every year. In doing so, they rely on a railway network that spans over 16,700 kilometers, 1,000 of which are dedicated to high-speed travel.
FS Italiane first crossed paths with the SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center (DCC) through Paolo Baroni (SAP Italy) as it was planning to redesign its logistics portal to meet the needs of both its customers and suppliers. Here, the company was focusing mainly on the challenges involved in improving user acceptance of the FS Italiane portal for logistics services, optimizing the overall user experience, and achieving smoother communications among the portal’s users.
Since the logistics portal serves many different use cases and end users, the overhaul of the underlying software needed to benefit not only FS Italiane, but its suppliers and customers, as well. Alessandro Sposato and Moritz Gekeler from the DCC were asked to assist FS Italiane in the redesign of the outdated, overly complex portal. In order to identify and address its problem areas, starting with an observation of the current working atmosphere on-site was essential. The DCC thus conducted user research and interviews to understand the everyday work of FS Italiane’s employees. This project was also the first opportunity for the DCC to enter the Italian market.
New Logistics Portal to Raise Acceptance
After collecting all the information from an online survey and its on-site end user research in Bari, the DCC formed a team with experts from the SAP partner AlmavivA – one of the leading Italian players operating in the global customer experience sector – and its subsidiary Almawave. In a four-day Design Thinking workshop in Rome, the team created personas (fictional characters representing different user types) and identified current and future business processes. Two DCC designers (Alessandro Sposato and Moritz Gekeler), one program manager (Paolo Baroni), one solution architect (Paolo Tegon), and four colleagues from Almawave attended the participatory design workshop. Both the user research in Bari and the design workshop in Rome were sponsored by FS Italiane. On the first day in the Italian capital, the team had the chance to work together with Vincenzo Lo Curto (Project Manager for IT Logistics, FS Italiane) to understand the customers’ needs in greater detail. They then analyzed processes and created some initial paper prototypes of the portal the following day. In the week thereafter, the interaction designers from the DCC formatted prototype iterations, crafted wireframes based on standard SAP Fiori processes, and personalized the SAP Fiori launchpad and internal applications. Meanwhile, AlmavivA focused on designing other applications. Just after another feedback round, a personalized interface was created and FS Italiane branding applied to the screens. In addition, the definition of a style guide helped the partner AlmavivA develop its apps according to the same visual design. In total, the project required about six weeks to enter the implementation phase. FS Italiane’s new logistics portal has now been online since July 14, 2015.
An Improved User Interface