UX Case Study
Namo Bharat Connect
The commuter app for India's first RRTS rapid-rail service — QR ticket booking, live fares, train tracking, and last-mile connections, built for a train system nobody in India had ridden before.
The commuter app for India's first RRTS rapid-rail service — QR ticket booking, live fares, train tracking, and last-mile connections, built for a train system nobody in India had ridden before.
Namo Bharat is India's first Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) — a semi-high-speed train connecting Delhi and Meerut, cutting a two-hour-plus road journey to under an hour. NCRTC needed a companion app for a category of transit that didn't exist in India yet: not quite metro, not quite intercity rail, running on a QR-ticket model with dynamic distance-based fares, premium and standard classes, and stations spread across two states.
There was no existing mental model for commuters to borrow from. A first-time rider needed to check a fare, understand a station's facilities, book a QR ticket, find their platform, and get to the station in the first place — with no habit or prior app to lean on. The app had to teach the system while getting out of the way of people who just wanted to catch a train.
UX designer across both the mobile app and its companion web app, covering the commuter-facing booking and journey-planning experience end to end.
A QR ticket only matters at the exact moment someone is walking through a station gate. That single use case — glance at phone, scan, walk through — set the design priority for the whole app: bookings and tickets had to be one tap from anywhere, not buried in a menu.
Six goals, drawn from the app's own stated feature set — check a fare, find a station, book a ticket, get there, and get home again.
Check fares by origin/destination before committing to a trip, with distance, time and station-count shown together.
Digital QR-based tickets that work standing at a gate, for single trips and round trips alike.
Lifts, escalators, parking, and accessibility info surfaced per station, not buried in a PDF.
Real-time train tracking and parking availability so a trip doesn't start with uncertainty.
Feeder bus timings and in-app cab/bike booking (via Rapido) so the station isn't the end of the journey.
English and Hindi supported from the home screen's language toggle onward, not as an afterthought.
Three commuter types, each hitting a different part of the app first.
"I know my route. Just let me rebook the same trip in two taps."
"I've never used a train like this — I need to know what it costs and how long it takes before I trust it."
"Booking for five people shouldn't be five times the effort of booking for one."
Mapped from the First-Time Rider — the persona with the least trust in the system going in, and the most to gain from good design.
Every screen in the app is a view onto one of six stages a ticket passes through — the structural spine the Bookings tab's Active/Completed split is built around.
Journey Planner / nearest station on Home
Fare Calculator — route, time, price
Passengers, class, single or round trip
QR ready, visible under Bookings → Active
Scan at gate, ride, arrive
Rate the trip, or rebook the same route instantly
Started from NCRTC's core feature list — fare calculator, station facilities, train tracking, parking status, trip planner, feeder bus, cab/bike booking, help & support — and grouped it around the moments a commuter actually needs each one, rather than mirroring an internal department structure.
Hand-sketched the three highest-traffic screens — Home, Fare Calculator, and Bookings — to lock the layout and information hierarchy before colour, iconography or the RapidX brand entered the picture.
Applied the RapidX brand system — orange primary, green and blue secondary accents, and full semantic ramps for error/warning/success — across the mobile app and the companion web app, then extended it to live states like post-rebooking bookings and in-context upgrade prompts.
Hand-sketched exploration of the three anchor screens — deliberately rough, so early reviews focused on what information mattered, not how it looked.
Sketch to shipped, for all three anchor screens.
Two more hi-fi screens that round out the core loop: station timings, and the app adapting to a live post-rebooking state.
A searchable station list (with voice search) leading into first/last train timings per station — the detail a commuter needs before 6am or after 10pm, when "will there even be a train" is the real question, not "which platform."
An in-context "Upgrade Available" banner surfaces directly inside the Active tickets list when a premium-class seat opens up on a booked route — placed where the commuter is already looking, rather than as a separate notification competing for attention.
The RapidX colour system — shown here as the actual reference sheet used for handoff, not a recreation.
Orange is reserved for the one action that matters on any given screen — Book Now, Try This Route, the central ticket tab — so it never competes with itself for attention across a screen.
A consumer transit app for a brand-new train category comes with its own pressures — most of them about trust and reach, not features.
The App Store listing itself ships in both languages — the in-app toggle on Home needed to feel native from the first screen, not translated after the fact.
Every screen for a first-time rider had to answer "is this legitimate and will it work" before it could ask them to book — a much higher trust bar than an app for an existing, known train line.
Namo Bharat, Pass, and DMRC tickets all needed to coexist in one Bookings screen without the seams showing, despite likely running on different backend systems.
Cab and bike booking routes out to the Rapido app rather than being built natively — meaning the design had to hand off cleanly at the station-arrival moment without feeling like a dead end.
Namo Bharat Connect is a live, published consumer app, so unlike the design-stage work above, there's real public signal to point to.
Average App Store rating.
apps.apple.com, 2026App Store ratings at time of writing.
apps.apple.com, 2026Booking lifecycle unified across three ticket systems (Namo Bharat, Pass, DMRC) in one screen.
English/Hindi supported from the home screen outward.
Public reviews on the App Store describe the app and the train it serves as fast and well-designed, with commuters specifically calling out the clean interface and how it simplifies planning and ticket booking. That reception is the clearest signal that the trust-building groundwork done at the Fare Calculator and Home screens — showing distance, time and station facilities before ever asking for a booking — was the right call for a first-of-its-kind service.
Designing for a train that doesn't exist anywhere else in the country meant the app couldn't lean on "commuters already know how this works." Every early decision — showing route facilities before asking for payment, keeping the ticket tab visually distinct in the nav bar, unifying three separate ticketing systems into one Bookings screen — was really in service of the same goal: get someone from "I've never heard of this train" to "I trust this enough to scan my phone at a gate," inside one sitting. The sketch-to-shipped comparisons above show that goal barely moved the layout once it was right at the wireframe stage; what hi-fi added was confidence, not restructuring.