Redesigning the ticketing flow for 10,000+ bus conductors across India
Chalo's ETIM is a handheld Android ticketing device used by bus conductors across India's state transport systems. The ticketing flow — select stop, choose destination, pick category, collect payment, print — repeats hundreds of times per shift on a 360px screen, one-handed, in a moving bus. I led the end-to-end redesign of this core loop: field research across five cities, identifying costly payment-selection errors, iterating on destination entry modes, and validating the new flow with 25–30 conductors.
MY ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
1 Designer, 1 PM, 3 Developers
TIMELINE
1 months
OBJECTIVE
Why revamp the ticketing flow?
The existing ETIM had grown organically — workflows varied across markets, many were unoptimized, and the UI was inconsistent with the broader Chalo product ecosystem. The revamp targeted three axes:
RESEARCH
Two very different users, one device
Field interviews revealed that conductors aren't a monolith. Age, experience, and comfort with technology create two distinct personas with different needs, frustrations, and workarounds.
8~12 Hrs
Shift length on a single charge
100s
Tickets issued per shift
16+
STUs and operators across India
Key Insight
Speed is one of the main thing which is a priority of every conductor.
THE BEFORE STATE
What was broken in the current ticketing flow
I mapped the existing ticketing flow end-to-end and identified specific usability issues through field observation and conductor interviews. The problems weren't theoretical — they cost conductors money and caused passenger friction daily.
01
Too many payment CTAs
Cash, UPI, Mobile, and Card were presented on the same screen with no visual hierarchy. In the stress of a crowded bus, conductors regularly tapped "Cash" when the passenger was paying digitally — and had to absorb the cost of the error themselves.
02
Overwhelming category list
The "All Categories" list displayed every passenger type in a long scrollable overlay. After selecting a category, it wasn't visible on the main ticketing screen — conductors had no confirmation of their selection. And there is no proper navigation.
03
Destination entry
A single text input expecting a stage number. New conductors who hadn't memorised the route's stage numbers couldn't use it without a printed cheat-sheet. There was no shortcut for the most common case (next passenger boarding at the same stop as the last).
"I stopped requesting new formats. It takes two weeks and three engineers to get one table to look right in the PDF. I just do it in Excel myself."
— Data Analyst, STU (paraphrased from stakeholder interview)
DESIGN
Iterating on the new flow
I explored three approaches for destination selection — the most contentious part of the redesign, since it's the first action in every ticket and conductors had strong preferences based on experience level.
User validation
Field testing in Nagpur, Sambhajinagar, Mumbai, TSRTC (Telangana), and Bhubaneswar. Methodology: live observation during ticket issuance, hands-on demo of the new flow, post-task interviews. Three experience bands per city.
Findings
Payment split
Every conductor preferred the segregated Cash vs. Digital design. The extra tap for digital was a non-issue because error prevention dominated.
Destination entry — clean split along experience lines.
New conductors (20–35) preferred the stop name list. Experienced conductors (50+) preferred stage number only. Conductors on flexible routes wanted both. This validated the configurability decision.
Category surfacing
Conductors confirmed Adult and Child cover the vast majority of their tickets and were happy to have them inline.
Outcome
The redesign was validated across all five cities and across all experience levels, and is moving to production.
Error reduction
The segregated payment design eliminates the single most costly daily error conductors faced. Faster for veterans. Stage number grid + repeat-ticket action reduces taps per ticket for the highest-volume users. Learnable for newcomers. Stop name list with stage numbers removes the printed cheat-sheet dependency. Configurable, not one-size-fits-all. The system adapts to the conductor.
Broader impact
This ticketing revamp anchors a larger ETIM platform redesign now in progress — covering card and pass issuance, conductor onboarding, shift management, and a new issue reporting system. The field research methodology validated here serves as the template for every subsequent flow.
REVIEWS
Related work
The waybills loaded onto every ETIM device are created and reconciled in Chalo's AFCS back-office dashboard, which I also redesigned. The two products are two ends of the same revenue chain.
