Four ways of making Scotland’s free bus travel service better
‘Government services must work for everyone who needs to use them.’
Digital Scotland Service Standard #5
‘Make substantial improvements throughout the lifetime of the service’
My daughter loves riding the bus and when she turned 5 she asked for ‘a pass to ride the bus for nothing and as much as I want’. This is not fanciful thinking. This is Scotland; until you are 22 there’s no need to pay to travel on a bus.
But first you need to enrol online and get sent a pass. That’s where it can get tricky.
Limited service
I’ve been slow to follow up on her request, because I’ve applied twice before for my other kids and the experience was not great. I remember it taking ages and being really convoluted to go through all the steps, and I was reluctant to go through it a third time.
I’m not the only one who’s run into problems; the service has been widely criticised by applicants and politicians for being complicated and low on uptake. Which is a pity, because it’s a great policy with loads of potential individual and societal benefits but the service experience lets it down.
Still the third time’s charm, right? And, it’s been over a year since the scheme launched and more than a year since I’d last applied. So on the assumption that there would have been plenty of improvements in between times, I decided to get the little lady off my back, took a deep breath and sat myself down in front of the laptop.
No change
Unfortunately, I could see no discernible improvements to the service.
It still took ages, and I experienced too much ambiguity across the steps involved in the journey. Had I not had it in mind to review the process, I might very well have given up and turned to a time-consuming face-to-face alternative or just dropped it altogether, which would have meant being left out of pocket and missing out on opportunities for my daughter and the family to travel around our community by public transport.
Looking at it, it would appear that the ‘Young Persons’ Free Bus Travel Scheme’ digital service falls short on at least 5 points of the Digital Scotland Service Standard:
1. Understand users and their needs
2. Solve a whole problem for users
3. Design and deliver a joined-up experience
4. Help users succeed first time
7. Iterate and improve frequently
It’s a shame. Not only is it a great scheme to save people money and to improve people’s access to education, work, facilities and businesses, it’s an ‘everyday’ service open to all parts of society and probably many young people’s first formative interaction in applying for something from the government.
Makes you wonder how many other great policies are being stymied by poor service delivery caused by not doing the basics of digital adequately.
Simple fixes
Good thing is it’s an easy fix with a bit of focus and effort.
It would be great to see the digital teams involved in the Scottish Government, Transport Scotland and the Improvement Service pick this up as a challenge, ship some small but mighty improvements at pace, and post about what they learn along the way for others in their community to follow.
In that spirit here are some areas it would be great to start with:
- Settle the naming of the service
My eldest son’s school refers to the cards as NEC cards. They’re often referred to as Young Scot cards. They carry SaltireCard branding. mygov.scot calls it ‘Apply for an under 22s bus pass’. The marketing campaign calls it ‘free bus travel’. The official name is ‘Young Persons’ Free Bus Travel Scheme’. But you get it through the ‘Get your NEC’ site, though on there they refer to the service as both ‘Get a Young Persons’ Free Bus Pass’ and ‘Young Persons’ Free Bus Travel Scheme’. This is too much ambiguity for the users.
The name you choose for your service is important to its success. Picking the right name means that users can more easily find your service, understand what it does, and be confident in their decision whether to use it or not. You should check how your service’s name performs after going live, through user testing, reviewing search terms and querying analytics.
Clearly that review is needed in this case and action taken to settle on the right service name, and then to work with those central to the promotion and delivery of the service to make sure everyone knows how to refer to it.
2. Rationalise the number of sites and steps involved
There are way too many sites claiming to be the place to apply for the free bus pass. I tried searches for ‘nec card’ and ‘free bus pass scotland’ and all of the top 8 results claimed to be the place to get information and (crucially) to apply for the pass.
Taking ‘free bus pass scotland’ for example, you get the following results (in order of appearance):
- https://young.scot/the-young-scot-card (sponsored result)
- https://www.transport.gov.scot/concessionary-travel/under-22s-free-bus-travel/ (first organic result)
- https://www.mygov.scot/under-22s-bus-pass
- https://young.scot/get-informed/young-persons-free-bus-travel/
- https://freebus.scot/
- https://www.stagecoachbus.com/promos-and-offers/national/scotland-under-22s-free-bus-travel
- https://getyournec.scot/nec/
- https://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/services/roads-transport-and-parking/public-transport/apply-free-bus-travel
Which is it? Not the first. Not the second. It is fact the 7th. And the other official place to apply according to mygov.scot, which is https://parentsportal.scot/, didn’t appear at all. Four of those sites are provided by the service owners. It’s a lot of unnecessary duplication.
In the case of a journey based on a search for ‘nec card’ where the user clicks on https://www.entitlementcard.org.uk/ — the first result — they are then sent to https://freebus.scot/ and then to https://getyournec.scot/nec/, then https://myaccount.signin.mygovscot.org/ and then back to https://getyournec.scot/necportal/apps/apply-for-card/applying-for. On that journey the user will go through 4 ‘apply now’ steps, three of which are mis-named eligibility checkers in which the same information is requested and needs to be provided each time, before finally landing on the actual application form.
In total, from searching, through answering 17 questions, uploading 6 forms of ID, through to confirmation of application, it took me 15 minutes and 06 seconds to apply. That’s a long journey.
3. Do an end-to-end content review
For quite a simple service that is open to such a broad range of people, the content along the way is not as clear as it should be.
Some examples:
- A mix of descriptive and abstract navigation menu options (‘Where’ and ‘Your NEC’ alongside ‘Contact’ and ‘Apply’ in the same nav bar)
- FAQs that are randomly ordered (‘Do you live in a student hall of residence?’ first followed by ‘What’s the Young persons’ free bus travel scheme?’)
- Inconsistent terminology (such as switching between ‘resident’ or ‘living in’, and ‘card’ or ‘pass’)
- Long-winded and vague sentences (like ‘From Monday 24 January, the acceptable ‘proofs’ you can provide for the Young Persons’ Free Bus Travel Scheme whether applying online or through offline application routes allow some extra flexibility — see Frequently Asked Questions for full details. Briefly, ‘out of date passports’ can be used to support an application and proof of residency documents may be dated within the last 12 months.’)
- Inconsistent button text (sometimes active and sometime passive such as ‘Myself’ and ‘Apply now’)
There needs to be a thorough but routine audit carried out by specialist content designers, some basic consistencies applied and some testing with users carried out to figure out how to make some of the more nuanced choices simpler and quicker for people to navigate.
4. Improve form design
Though the application form design was fairly straightforward for someone without disabilities, the form design did feel a bit rushed and clumsy in places. More thorough user testing and accessibility auditing would no doubt turn up some more substantial improvements, but there are some straightforward fixes to be made by applying the Digital Scotland Design System.
For example:
- Unpredicatable call to action choices (sometimes link text and sometimes buttons)
- Inconsistent appearance of buttons (varying designs on the same forms, often divergent from the Digital Scotland Design System)
- Confusing confirmation patterns
- Inconsistent display and capture of data (such as varied date of birth and age range formats)
- Switching between asking one or multiple questions per form page (for example, the 11th page carries a request to confirm that the applicant gives parental approval for free concessionary travel and then on the same page asks for a proof of relationship with the child to be uploaded)
Big benefits
These are all straightforward things to address that don’t require a great deal of effort. They probably only need a small multidisciplinary team working for as little as a fortnight to address.
With at least 40% of young people in Scotland still to benefit, it’s worth making this small investment. It will have a positive impact on people’s experience of using the service, perhaps their confidence in using Scottish government digital services in the future, and encourage take up of the scheme so that we can all start enjoying its benefits.
I’ll be back to see how they’ve been getting on, when one of my kids inevitably loses their card.
