The BudapestGO app was designed to make public transportation a more favorable choice for getting around in Budapest. By integrating all essential public transport services, including real-time vehicle information, journey planning, and ticket purchases, the app makes life easier for urban travellers on a daily basis.
In the past, digital public transport services were highly fragmented in Budapest, with separate stand-alone applications for ticketing, route planning, and live traffic information.
By integrating all essential public transport services and new convenience features into one app, BKK’s (Centre for Budapest Transport) goal was to design the ultimate go-to transit companion for city dwellers.
This brand-new digital tool we built for BKK together with our partners, Telekom Rendszerintegrátor Zrt (T-Systems) and RealCity, is a comprehensive and user-friendly application that meets all the needs of urban transportation users.
The results speak for themselves:
Within just one year of its debut, BudapestGO garnered 2.6 million downloads and boasted 1.2 million monthly active users in a city of two million until April 2023.
Public transport is often criticized for using inconvenient processes and lacking a human-centred design approach. For many, public transit is riddled with anxieties surrounding the predictability of services. Driven by a need for predictability and comfort, people commute using their cars while rising noise pollution, dirt, and smog make our cities ever more unliveable.
“Am I going to make that connection? Is there a ticket machine to buy tickets? Can I board the tram with my wheelchair?” – These are questions that passengers don’t need to ask themselves anymore when using BudapestGO.
The new BudapestGO app gives users peace of mind by serving as a one-stop-shop for the city’s public transport and walking city dwellers through their unique mobility challenges like no other app before.
Whether users want to optimize their journeys for efficiency, check easy-access vehicles, or choose the most sustainable transportation options, the app supports them from route planning to ticket validation.
Topping this with extra convenience factors—such as special ticket types only available digitally or offering tickets for other cities’ public transport services—BKK encourages riders to use the BudapestGO app, offering a carefree alternative to using cars for 2.5 million people residing in the greater Budapest area.
Buying tickets for public transit remained an offline experience in Budapest for a long time. Shifting to digital ticketing (and defying our cemented paper addiction) was arduous for most passengers, even if it made their lives easier.
To make the digital practice more tangible for our users, we recreated the good old ticket validation experience and adopted visual cues from the physical world that remind people of the familiarity of the Budapest public transport.
Budapest's digital ticketing system is based on scanning Aztec codes placed on vehicles' sides. To accelerate ticket validation, we created a widget through which users can validate tickets directly from the home screen of their phones with a single tap.
We aimed to reduce stress caused by keeping track of the expiry time of your monthly pass and introduced the subscription-based monthly pass that automatically renews at the end of the expiration date.
In our world of comfort, where people are used to jumping in their cars to get from A to B without any second thought, turning public transport into a more efficient and carefree choice is an absolute step 0 on a journey toward creating a more liveable urban life.
And this is what the BudapestGO app does best: by redefining the commuting experience, it provides better access to mobility services for people with the widest range of needs and prompts people to use more sustainable modes of transport.
We were incredibly happy to see that the app didn't only get a warm welcome from its users but got recognised by the international jury of iF Design too.
