# Digital public transport ticketing

With the [Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government](https://www.act.gov.au/) in 2023 I helped design onboarding, account sign in and registration, and some cool micro-interactions for key moments in their upcoming public transport app and infrastructure refresh.

## Context

In a collaboration between multiple business areas, the ACT Government needed to figure out how to build on and scale its citizen account SSO patterns.

They had been chosen as the identity provider for a new public transport app, and needed to figure out how this new high-volume integration would work.

At the core this project was about designing SSO for a third-party app. The ACT has an existing 'ACT Digital Account' that centralises citizens data and connecting to services, in a very similar pattern to Google or Apple SSO.

This saw us prototyping the iOS experience and how it translated into web views of the citizen's account.

<video src="https://gzron00wavzc73b5.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/transport-scan.mp4"
  alt="A mans hand holds a QR code digital ticket on a phone. He moves it under a grey device held up by boxes, and the screen changes to green with a large tick."
  autoplay muted loop playsinline webkit-playsinline preload="metadata" title="Exploring opportunities to capture accounts. Pretend the grey device is a scanner."
  tabindex="-1" aria-hidden="true"
  controlslist="nodownload noplaybackrate nofullscreen noremoteplayback"></video>

## SSO and concessions

Concessions was the next problem to solve, making sure Students, Seniors and other eligible customers could easily use the account to prove their identity and access discounted rates.

![3 phone design screenshots side by side, showing a login screen for 'My Way +', and a digital purple card.](/images/work/public-transport/transport-card.avif "Part of SSO involved designing when, and the where, potential account triggers could be.")

Seniors have complicated both Territory and Federal government rights to concession or free travel that we had to determine during signup or account migration.

## Coaching and advisory

After the initial iOS app prototyping I became an advisor and a coach to the team, who progressed to designing the concession form flows within the account web views.

I helped work through the technical design considerations of the SSO we were using, its implications to our app integration and worked with another designer to design onboarding in a way that felt as much as an introductory value proposition, as it did a useful onboarding experience.

<video src="https://gzron00wavzc73b5.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/transport-onboarding.mp4"
  alt="A screen recording of a design tool showing an onboarding flow. Each time the 'Next' button is pressed, the screen animates to the next state."
  autoplay muted loop playsinline webkit-playsinline preload="metadata" title="For many, this was their first impression with the ACT Government's SSO service — so we had to make it count"
  tabindex="-1" aria-hidden="true"
  controlslist="nodownload noplaybackrate nofullscreen noremoteplayback"></video>

## The launch of MyWay+

The MyWay+ app launched in late 2024 to mixed reviews.

I won't shy away from the topic here. It's no secret that the final app launch was controversial, the first page of a search result will tell you that. Many of the problems were infrastructural, with physical scanning machines not behaving as expected or account migration issues.

I'm happy to say that our work indeed highlighted the complexity of, and designed a solution for, SSO integration and concession validation within the app — which itself never faced many issues on launch.

## Learning

This project was strategic. It sought to highlight issues with current plans and offer a path forward — but we were not working directly with the vendor building the app from their white-label solution. Our influence remained mostly over the SSO portal integration.

Still, I learned a lot.

I now see how project narratives can go awry, and how storytelling should revolve around resolutions to problems, not the problems themselves. It is less compelling to make an argument that the current path a team is on has issues. It is more compelling to build a narrative around a better future state that just happens to have those issues resolved.

When deadlines loom and foundational decisions are being made either way, provide a feasible path instead of a theoretical consideration. Don't point the way, pave the way.

## In collaboration with

- Kate Stone, Product Manager
- Lyndal Fleming, Product Designer
- Jessica Wong, Research
- Anthony McGinness, Policy Design
- Laura Ryan, Research & Strategy