Putting Passengers First

Nahverkehrsservice Sachsen-Anhalt GmbH (NASA) plays a key role in public transport across the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. 

Established in 1997, the company is responsible for managing and advancing regional rail passenger services (SPNV) throughout the region. Its core responsibilities include the planning, funding and quality assurance of regional rail operations, carried out in close collaboration with various transport providers. NASA’s mission is to deliver an efficient, sustainable and appealing mobility offering that meets the needs of the population.

One of NASA GmbH’s defining characteristics is their strong focus on customer feedback while shaping and improving public transportation in Saxony-Anhalt. Historically, this feedback exchange has taken place through passenger advisory councils, giving participants an opportunity to share their views and suggestions in an in-person format.

NASA GmbH wanted to keep this core principle in their operations but in a modernized and simplified way. This was first enabled through an off-the-shelf forum solution. As time went on, the system proved increasingly restrictive, lacking flexibility or customization for new feature additions such as surveys. The solution offered poor usability on mobile devices and posed significant challenges for the editorial team receiving the feedback in the backend.

Because of these limitations, NASA GmbH decided to replace both their provider and their system. They partnered with Netresearch DTT GmbH due to their TYPO3 expertise, in addition to their extensive forum experience as seen on the neighborhood platform (lej-nachbarn.de - no longer active) for the Central German airports. 

TYPO3 CMS was chosen as the solution for this passenger forum due to its flexibility, scalability and security required for a long-term solution. TYPO3’s highly extensible architecture stood in sharp contrast to the previous off-the-shelf platform. The system through TYPO3 could be fully adapted to NASA GmbH’s corporate design, consistently implementing a mobile-first approach which ensured an optimal user experience across devices. The use of TYPO3 also enables powerful forum functionalities through established extensions while also supporting custom development for specific requirements such as Single Sign-On with Google and Apple.

Netresearch played a key role in shaping the platform’s overall concept and technical architecture, transforming a limiting legacy solution into a modern, scalable participation platform. The team was well prepared for this challenge and began with a collaborative workshop,, clearly defining the functional requirements for an on-time launch and any future expansion. Netresearch’s extensive forum development experience played a major role in the early stages of the project, allowing them to select and integrate the right building blocks (e.g. combining proven community extensions such as pforum, sf_register, felogin and news) in addition to custom-built extensions, supporting advanced features such as Google and Apple Single Sign-On. This knowledge and approach solved the core limitation of the previous system by implementing interactive capabilities that were not previously possible.

Due to the old system’s restrictions, the team delivered a mobile-first design, aligned with NASA GmbH’s corporate identity, enhancing both usability and recognition across devices. The forum became visually coherent with the corporate brand and offered a more engaging user experience. With the goal of supporting long-term autonomy, the team created a comprehensive editorial manual and improved TYPO3 backend usability, enabling NASA’s team to  manage the majority of the administrative tasks independently. This optimized workflow reduced reliance on developers for everyday maintenance.

Throughout the development process, NASA and the team at Netresearch worked in close collaboration, including regular review cycles to ensure alignment. This process ensured transparency and encouraged real-time feedback on progress. As a result, features were refined to better meet NASA’s needs. 

The implementation of the TYPO3-based passenger forum has delivered measurable improvements for NASA GmbH in terms of usability, editorial efficiency and long-term scalability.

Key outcomes include:

• Increased user accessibility and engagement through a mobile-first design and improved usability, leading to over 100 new user registrations within the first month / initial discussion phase
• Higher participation and active community engagement, with more than 200 ideas and posts submitted and over 300 comments contributed by users since launch
• Brand consistency through full integration of NASA’s corporate design
• Reduced dependency on developers, as the editorial team can now manage users, content, statistics and mailings independently
• Improved backend efficiency due to a structured TYPO3 setup and dedicated editorial documentation
• Enhanced scalability, allowing new features (e.g. surveys or additional interaction formats) to be added without changing the system foundation
• Secure and sustainable platform architecture based on enterprise-level TYPO3 standards

Netresearch addressed key limitations of the previous system. The lack of flexibility, poor mobile usability, limited design customization and restrictive backend workflows were replaced by a scalable participation platform that strengthens both user engagement and editorial control. 

The collaboration is ongoing. The scalable TYPO3 architecture allows for continuous development and feature expansion, and Netresearch continues to support NASA GmbH in further optimizing and evolving the passenger forum as requirements grow.