DIGITAL & STRATEGIC
UX DESIGN PRACTICE
UX FOR THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Creating a customer focused service for future bus services in Wales
Increasing demand for public transport while reducing operational costs.
Reimagining the bus travel customer experience in Wales, designing a human-centred service while growing internal team capabilities and building alignment around it.
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The project delivered a coherent vision for the requirements of a future Welsh bus service, grounded in user insights and communicated through tangible design concepts. The work has helped build capability within Transport for Wales for delivering user-centred outcomes across the transport network through a clear experience framework. This provides the organisation with a means to create a more human-centred bus service, and to tie design decisions across the network back to customer needs and value.
The work has generated further interest from the Welsh government to apply and test these approaches across other projects. Also, in response to the Well-being of Future Generations Act (Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, 2015), this work has also provided a clear articulation of how customer-centred strategies can contribute to achieving the goals set out in the act.
Arup supported Transport for Wales in expanding its role from managing the Wales and Borders rail franchise to delivering integrated transport options across multiple modes. As part of a team redesigning the network across the country, Arup led a User Experience workstream to assess the current bus service from the customer's perspective and design an improved future service.
To achieve this aim, Arup conducted comprehensive user experience research, including customer interviews, surveys, and workshops, to understand bus users' goals and pain points. By recruiting participants nationwide and ensuring inclusivity through bilingual translation and phone interviews, the team developed detailed user journeys, customer segmentation, and personas. The insights and concepts developed within the User Experience workstream were used to inform technical design decisions across other workstreams, and Co-creation workshops were facilitated with design teams to embed this user experience thinking in the design of key services layers across the bus network.
The final deliverables of the project included a web application that allows users to enter certain details about their proposed device services and then calculate values relating to the technical feasibility, cost, and carbon impact of using different materials to build it.
Project Highlights
Enhancing traditional consultation practice through a Service Design lens
Consultation is the well-established process of going out to communities to get their feedback. It is one way that governments can connect with people and understand how projects might affect them and gives people a chance to express how they feel about a proposed change. These are open-door exercises, which invite everyone, but despite best efforts, can struggle to get engagement from a representative cross-section of society. There are many practical reasons for this, sometimes people don’t know it is happening, other times their work or caring responsibilities make it difficult for them to attend, or they are unfamiliar or intimidated by the formats. Though fantastic work exists in this space, consultation can only go part way to making a design people-centred.
Service design and user research methods—the practice of understanding people’s needs as the starting point for design—is a well-established practice of designing products and services for people. Originating in the tech-sector to design desirable, feasible and viable products and services, it is having a growing influence on the built environment, shifting the way we design our cities and services. Instead of asking for feedback on a design, we understand people’s current experiences, values and behaviours and design a service accordingly. Typical research methods include deep interviews, journals, spatial observations, behavioural observations, co-design workshops.
To do this well, we need to curate the people we speak to. Meaning we create stringent criteria for who we want to engage with to ensure no voices are forgotten or overshadowed by others. A sample of 20-40 people is appropriate to gather the insight needed through qualitative research. Further quantitative research can be undertaken to complement the qualitative findings when appropriate.
There is an essential role for both consultation and user research in the design process. To get the best outcome, user research needs to happen at the inception of a project and should carefully select who to include. Consultation should happen before a design is finalised and implemented and should invite anyone who wants to comment to do so.
