Search is an oft overlooked part of the digital customer experience. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) may not often jump to mind as a leader in mobile CX and UX, for good reason. Before 2022, the MTA’s Long Island Railroad and Metro-North Railroad had their train schedules and ticket purchasing in two separate apps. (To get an idea of how much customers liked navigating between different apps, read the reviews for the connecting CTRail’s similar and poorly reviewed eTix ticket purchasing app.) However, senior UX researcher Olivia De Sonne Ammaccapane shows below how the MTA is employing user-focused search to improve the travel experience of golf fans.
Thousands of people will flock to Bethpage, Long Island over the next few weeks to attend the 2025 Ryder Cup. Players from many nations, guests from out of town, and golf enthusiasts the world over will come to the island to experience the tournament, with many using the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) to get to the event.
Some of these folks will be classic tourists, facing all the cliched struggles of decoding a foreign transit system and getting lost (physically or digitally) along the way. Others will be LIRR veterans—weekend warriors and daily commuters who can recite the timetables as easily as their own names.
We often expect the former of those demographics to be the ones in greatest need of assistance. But as a local islander and a regular user of the MTA TrainTime app, I found myself in just as much need of direction.
To attend the Ryder Cup by train, I assumed that I should ride to Bethpage, the town where the Cup is taking place. Instead, I was surprised and delighted by the TrainTime app when a search for “Bethpage” yielded not just its namesake station, but also Farmingdale station, the next stop to the east, with a label that read “Ryder Cup 2025.” Thus, I was informed that the PGA is staging Ryder Cup ticketing and shuttles out of Farmingdale, not Bethpage.
Search functions are a website feature rife with possibility—and difficulty. Our clients regularly come to CI’s UX team to test their search functions, seeking to address user needs and decrease costly customer service call volume.
Users often express that a search bar is their first line of defense when seeking help, but that they are regularly disappointed by the results. Users have been trained by best-in-class search experiences (like Google). They expect the system to understand the meaning behind their query, even if they use the “wrong” words or their phrasing is incomplete or unclear. When internal search systems fall short of these expectations, users quickly abandon them.
The reality is that most site and app-specific searches operate with significant limitations compared to what users expect. They rely on narrow keyword matching against limited databases, missing the contextual clues and intent recognition that make modern search feel effortless. Users might search for “return policy” when the system only recognizes “refunds,” creating a gap between user intent and available solutions.
That was the beauty of my interaction with the TrainTime app. What it did so remarkably was that it went several layers deep into user experience, bridging the expectation gap. It addressed a variety of potential search approaches, even responding to a search for “Ryder.”
Instead of forcing users to know the “correct” search terms, the system understood and prioritized the user’s core need: how to get to the Ryder Cup. The intuitive search results coupled with the context-aware “Ryder Cup 2025” station label made it instantly clear how to reach that goal and prevented a rider like me from making a costly and frustrating mistake. The MTA TrainTime app went to a level of user-centricity that we rarely see, truly putting the use cases of both veteran and first-time riders at the heart of its functionality.
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Olivia De Sonne Ammaccapane
Olivia De Sonne Ammaccapane is a senior UX researcher at CI.