UX research | UX design
Transport for london
Putting user research at the heart of TfL Digital’s programme
The challenge
After completing a stint as Interim UX Manager at TfL, I was asked by the Head of Digital to stay on and start a formal programme of user experience research. We both felt that this would help TfL Digital succeed in its vision “to deliver digital experiences as good as the best retail and service organisations”.
At the time, the Digital team was located at grade 2 listed 55 Broadway, above St. James’s Park station. It is a beautiful Art Deco building and has a shortage of meeting space. I was offered a meeting room to be used exclusively as a research lab, but preferred to assemble a mobile research lab instead. This would allow us to conduct research anywhere, and easily set up an observation room in an adjacent room, with no impact on the building infrastructure or availability of meeting spaces.
Having set this up, I promoted the research programme to business engagement managers and team leads, who were then able to incorporate user research into their project plans. A few example projects are listed below. One of the most satisfying things about researching for TfL is that so many Londoners are engaged in the subject matter - as a result, it is a real pleasure to conduct guerrilla research and relatively few potential participants refuse to talk to you.
Visiting London
- This section of tfl.gov.uk for tourists visiting London had become bloated over time, and the research sought to identify the content that visitors found most useful and get feedback on a number of new concepts ranging from overseas IP address detection to an updated section structure.
- With a Spanish-speaking colleague, I conducted a series of guerrilla interviews with visitors in some of London’s tourist hotspots, including St. Paul’s, Greenwich and Hyde Park. We also spoke to Tourist Information Advisors, who were able to draw on their experience of helping visitors travel around the capital.
- Key insights: The main finding was that visitors did not usually think about transport until they had arrived in London. This meant that innovations such as overseas IP detection (to take them straight to the Visiting London section) and selling Visitor Oyster cards before their arrival were not worth pursuing.
Plan a Journey updates
- Journey Planner was the most visited part of TfL’s website, with the results page accounting for 42.7% of visits. As part of the Continuous Improvement Project, the design team made some changes that supported TfL’s mission to change travel habits and remove stress from the rail and bus networks.
- To properly evaluate the new designs, and to get feedback to the team as soon as possible so that development was not held up, I proposed using RITE methodology at TfL for the first time. I moderated the sessions in one room, whilst a colleague added Post-It notes to A3 print-outs of each screen in the observation room.
- After the last session, we conducted a wash-up and agreed the themes that had emerged, and how we would present these back to to the scrum team on the next day.
- Key insights: The proposed designs, showing 7 different transport modes in the results, went down very well with participants. However, implementing this idea would have meant 7 times the number of calls to the database, which would have brought an already very busy site to its knees. So, the research feedback was used to prioritise the transport modes into primary (shown on the initial results page) and secondary (shown as links), and this is how the Journey Planner results are structured today.
Night Tube formative research
- TfL was planning to launch the Night Tube at the time I was working there. The team had started to think about the implications for Journey Planner and for the eSUBs (electronic Status Update Boards) and had some early concepts to validate with potential users of the service.
- I decided that it would be most revealing to interview people who were about to travel late at night, so the project’s designer and I conducted guerrilla interviews outside hospitals, in pubs and on buses. The participants were either tired or tipsy, so they did not hold back when there was something they didn’t understand!
- Key insights: The wording in the designs had become quite political, because TfL was keen to reassure passengers that the service was running as planned. However, participants did not understand why the Northern line was claiming to have “normal service” when only one branch (via Leicester Square) was operational at night. Our strong recommendation, therefore, was to use different language when referring to the status of Night Tube lines.
Pattern library
- TfL’s new website launched in March 2014 - we got there with different teams working on parallel tracks with not enough exchange of detailed information. This led to some inconsistencies in interactions on the site. In addition, there was a lot of tacit knowledge in long-term team members’ heads that needs to be documented.
- I suggested that TfL Digital should have a pattern library and started to conduct best practice research and speak to senior stakeholders to understand their requirements and build a business case for a pilot project. Next, I facilitated a co-creation workshop in which senior designers and developers collaboratively sketched templates containing component designs, implementation rules, code snippets, and accessibility information.
- Outcome: The document that I left behind showed how much money the pattern library could save TfL, how it should be linked to the live site, and the governance model for allowing new and updated components.
SSRTI dashboard
- As part of the Fit for the Future programme, TfL equipped all station staff with iPads containing a range of purpose-built apps. One of these apps was for reporting incidents that might affect the efficiency of a Tube station, such as overcrowding on platforms and escalator outages.
- I was asked to develop an interface for monitoring all of these station incidents at a line level (for example, at the Jubilee line control room) or at a network level, so that co-ordinated action could be taken.
- In series of stakeholder interviews, my colleague and I learned how line and network controllers dealt with these incidents. We then created a paper prototype for a dashboard and developed it to mid-fidelity, testing our designs with controllers at every step to ensure that their needs were being met and that it was easy to identify incidents as they happened.
- Outcome: The dashboard design had two views - a listing view and a map view. The listing view was developed by a third party and is now in use at TfL’s control centres.
Validation research library
- I found working at Transport for London very rewarding, but had to leave (along with many other contractors) because of cost savings made in the lead-up to the mayoral election of 2016. Since TfL Digital had clearly benefitted from solid user research, I wanted this to continue after my departure.
- I put together a research resource library to help the UX designers to conduct user research (there were no plans to hire a UX researcher). This is organised is rough chronological order, so that designers can go through the library step-by-step to plan, moderate and report their research.
- Outcome: I don’t know if the research library is still being used at TfL Digital. But I do share it with my UXPA mentees, who find it extremely useful for getting started in UX research!
