Service Design Case Study: Redesigning The Future Of Public Transport
By: Justin Pybus
Tags: Design Thinking, User Experience, UX, UX Research, Service Design

The Project Team

The team was a mix of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Consultants and Client-Side stakeholders) combining our expertise with their in-house specialities to cover all aspects.

Our team: 7 of ‘us’ brought core capabilities such as Service Design, UX Design, Cognitive & Analytics, and Technical Business Analysis.

Their team: 4 of ‘them’ provided Systems Engineering, Technical, and Enterprise Architecture know-how, with a further 10 or so stakeholders and SME’s on call to feed into requirements along the course of the project.

Logistics: We worked 4 days client site (1 day per week at our HQ).

Our Approach

Our initial project plan considered how each member of the team would be spending their time — whether that was researching, planning for workshops, taking care of project management details, or providing oversight.

But most plans come with caveats — and this was no exception!

Shortly after starting we quickly realized that some of the activities we had planned (eg: creating persona’s of core user types) were no longer needed.

Extensive user research had already been done

About 18 accurate personas already existed

Detailed business requirements existed

Even detailed prototypes of similar desktop and mobile experiences already existed!

Pivot! Change the plan

So while this was kind of good news, it also meant that we had to rethink our approach and where we should be channeling our efforts.

The worst possible outcome for everyone would be to walk away from the engagement with the client feeling like they had hired us for nothing and we hadn’t delivered value.

Plan B

So while some of our team continued working on activities that had formed the first few weeks of work, the project managers went back to the drawing board and tweaked the plan — placing more focus on the Customer Journey Mapping activities.

Research

We started off where all projects should — Research.

It’s an essential step where everyone gets to take a deep breath of fresh inspiration before diving into the core activities of the project. We spent the first few days of the project looking at local and international competitors — from technology to UX/UI, and service design — we began to understand the landscape.

The experiences that those companies are delivering today, will shape the expectations in our users’ minds — so scanning the horizons helped us understand more or less what our users are going to expect!

Takeaways: We were inspired, amused and everything in between! There’s a lot going on… From Uber to Oyster, Google Maps to Citimapper.

Inspiring:

“Be-in, Be-out”: Amazon Go’s new way to pay for groceries without having to physically pay

Google maps in Japan shows fare prices for public transport

Citimapper is using smart data to optimize travel routes (and even trialing introducing a bus service that will rival London’s traditional double-deckers!).

Amusing:

Citimapper’s public transport app lets you choose ‘JetPack’ as a mode of public transport. Wonder what happens if you do?

Slightly creepy?

In Shenzhen, jaywalkers are being fined using A.I. and facial recognition technology. Offenders will get a nasty text message, and if applicable that’s how they get their fines too.

Reviewing Existing Documentation

A lot of existing documentation had been supplied by our client. Business requirements, Personas, Prototypes and more… and although unexpected, it was a helpful base for us to build on.

Pros: We hadn’t expected any of this groundwork to be done for us, so our workload was somewhat reduced. Also, our client had recently completed a similar project in the USA and had some old Invision and Sketch prototypes for us to have a look at. And while it’s never safe to assume that what works for another product will work for yours, they did help us to see how similar U.X. and I.A. problems had been resolved elsewhere.

Cons: Some of the documentation was inaccurate — the Business Requirements were up to 5 years old and there were some discrepancies — but our Business Analyst spotted these quickly fixed them up with our client.

Workshops: Co-designing The Future State

When we first pitched for the work we promised our client:

“Our multidisciplinary project team will design with your people, not just for them”

We were about to re-shape the future of public transport in our city, and the entire state — so we needed all the expert input we could get and workshops are a great way to do this.

Kickoff Workshop

Kicking off at 9 O’Clock sharp, we held an intensive all-day session to understand what the expectation was internal, any potential risks, and which areas of the business might be affected by all the change that was about to get set in motion.

In total, we had over 20 enthusiastic people in the room — all ready to roll up their sleeves and dive in. And having so many stakeholders invested was great, but definitely needed some careful planning!

The last thing you want is a workshop where people aren’t engaged, so it’s vital that the workshop is well managed and everyone is able to feed in their perspective.

Activities we facilitated:

We used a mix of different activities throughout the course of the day to keep everybody focussed and engaged.

At the start of a project, an Ice-Breaker activity is a good way to set the right atmosphere so everyone feels comfortable enough to share their thoughts.

Running the Ice-Breaker:

We printed about 100 public transport relevant, thought-provoking images and lay them out on the table. Next, we asked everyone to choose an image that represents the current state today, and one that represents the future. Everybody then had a few minutes to explain their choice in front of the group.

Some people shared funny narratives whilst others were more serious — but now we were ready to get into the core workshop activities.

We asked stakeholders: “To work towards this vision, what does success look like for this project?”. Everybody took a few minutes to get their thoughts on post-it notes.

An example from a Project Manager was “Tangible deliverables tied to delivery phases” or one from the Customer Experience perspective said, “customers telling us what they need”.

Everyone had their own perspectives and this was a great way to capture them.

We asked everyone “To achieve these objectives, what teams, stakeholders, sponsors, or partners will need to be involved, and who will be affected by these changes?”.

Again, thoughts were noted on post-its and a group discussion followed. We grouped all the post-its into 3 categories:

Core team Involved Informed (aka not directly involved)

We needed to understand the ecosystem that we would be changing, and consider what tools different user types would need from us. Customers, Frontline staff, and Backstage staff would all need to be considered — so we added our considerations to post-its and stuck them up for discussion.

To understand stakeholder expectations in more detail, we used context and images as triggers. The front page of an online newspaper seemed like a good prompt!

We printed out a few copies per person and handed them out to the group. Everybody chose the image they thought was most relevant and crafted their own ‘future state’ breaking news headline.

Our favorite was “Improved customer data improves network performance by 50%.’’

To start defining the stakeholder’s vision for the future state customer experience, we handed out the template shown above. Each person was asked to describe their ideal journey in relation to a chosen persona and the 7 stages of travel they would experience.

It got everyone thinking about the people and processes needed to enable that user experience, and the systems, platforms & processes needed to enable that user experience and those people/processes.

Lots of information — but crucial! These were the core building blocks of the Service Blueprint that we delivered at the end.

To set ourselves up for success we needed to understand any potential blockers.

We asked ourselves and stakeholders “What are the challenges, risks, and dependencies that stand in the way of us achieving our future state?”.

After getting our thoughts up on the wall, everyone got 3 sticker dots and voted on which areas they thought were most critical.

The standout has to be “Risk: not enough gangster rap killing my vibe” 😂 but another very real example was “Risk: designing a solution that isn’t advanced enough, and it’s old as soon as it launches”.

The speed of technological change is real!

Space were actions were recorded.